This week, a high school girl killed herself.

I'm sure many high school girls and other precious people around the world found it too difficult to live this week, but this girl killed herself in my city, at a high school just a few bus stops away. It's always that much more difficult when something like that happens close to us, even if we didn't know the person.

I've been to that high school before, walked around it with my friend Jane. It's supposed to be the best high school in the city. To me it looks more like a university than a high school, with its huge campus boasting multi-story buildings and dorms. Here, it is not uncommon for high school students to live away from home.

I asked my friend why the girl did it. Was it being away from her parents? Was it the heavy work load? I always comment on how hard my high school friends have to work, how they never seem to have a moment to themselves. And right now is crunch time, the worst of exam season. It would make sense. It's happened before.

But that wasn't the reason, apparently. School officials read her journal.

She liked girls.

I may be on the other side of the world, but I'm still keeping up with what's happening in the States. And if it's difficult to be gay or lesbian in the States, I know it must be difficult over here, where it's relatively under the radar and few people are discussing or acknowledging it.

Regardless of what we think about the propriety of men liking men or women liking women, this should never have to occur. No one should ever feel that trapped. It's not about the fact that she liked girls so much as the fact that she did not feel free to bare her soul, with its changes and struggles.

In order to be trapped, a person must first box herself in. She must burrow deep into a hole where she thinks no one can hurt her. She must hide. But what happens when her hiding place becomes her prison? When the choice to hide herself is no longer her own, but the choice of someone fixing a stone door over her cave? Telling her she can never come out, that no one wants to see her as she truly is? The damp earth becomes suffocating, even to the point of death.

We refuse to show ourselves to those around us. We refuse to admit the darkness, the doubt, that constantly lurks underneath our smiling faces. And because we hide our own darkness, our differences, we encourage others to hide theirs. Because we are afraid, we project fear onto others. And so, one by one, we all burrow into our caves. Until everyday conversation is a strain, because no one is truly revealing themselves anymore.

I wish someone had told that girl that she could reveal herself, in all her mess and magnificence. That she had known, deep down, that she would be unconditionally loved. That as she worked through the turbulence of adolescence, she would have had that blessed assurance of a hand that will never let her go.

But a person who must hide herself every waking second is lost in every sense of the word.

C.S. Lewis writes that being truly "saved" does not entail the cancellation of sin and shame but rather the willingness to bear it to the world, pointing to God's grace all the while and trusting Him alone to cover it.

"As for the fact of sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God's compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe" (The Problem of Pain).

It's as though the Free are dancing around naked, not because they are stainless and pure but because they are covered by something other than clothes, something other than what the world gives to mask shame. All of the messiness and grit is out in the open, but we refuse to be humiliated. Yes, we will continue to boast in our weaknesses, proclaim our failings from the rooftops, air our stubbornness and our stupidity and our different-ness, laughing all the while and feeling completely unashamed, because of the One who eternally covers us, molds us, and will never abandon his creations. Our hidden things out in the open are all to His glory.

I long for and dream of a world in which no one feels so trapped that death seems to be the only way out. Where no one wants to shrink to the point of oblivion. But those who do not know Love cannot come out of their caves, because they have never known the One who is completely loving, completely trustworthy, and completely unfailing. No one has ever shown them that such love exists. Therefore, to be out in the open means to be torn apart. And so these precious souls wither, souls who never had the chance to hear about grace.

Finally, speaking of Heaven and the Kingdom, Lewis writes,

"...Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place."

They would, if they knew the public place was also the place of grace.