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Good morning. Last week Dev Patel won a BAFTA award for the part of Saroo in the film Lion. Saroo’s a carefree college kid in Australia. He’s stricken with loss and longing when he recalls being tragically separated from his mother in India twenty years before. The uncovering of traumatic memories transforms Saroo into a tortured soul, racked with confusion, guilt and despair. Before long he’s isolated himself from all close relationships. He’s spiralling into self-destruction. This is a state many know all too well, but few talk about. Suicide is the biggest killer of men aged under 45 in this country. How often when we ask, ‘How are you?’ do we truly listen to the answer? Everyone knows the correct response is, ‘Fine.’ Any other reply is breaking the social code. When a person takes their own life, often friends say, ‘I had no idea – he always seemed pretty cheerful.’ That’s how hard it is to say, ‘I’m really struggling.’ Each spring at St Martin-in-the-Fields we hold a service for those affected by suicide. It’s amazing to stand with four or five hundred people, all of whose lives have been seared by this terrible scar. Some at the service have pondered taking their own life. Others are trying to cope with the loss of loved ones who’ve done so. All of us are trying to find words for something indescribable. It puts me in mind of one of the most paradoxical of all the sayings in the Bible: ‘My strength is made perfect in weakness.’ We project onto God our assumption that the way to be secure is to be strong, powerful and imposing. But St Paul says the way to address our vulnerability, fear, and self-destructiveness is by making friends with our weakness. We can’t drive away our demons by willpower. We can’t get through the troubles of life by self-reliance alone. In the end we have to take the risk of reaching out, trusting another person, and saying, ‘I’m not holding it together. I can’t pretend anymore.’ Lion is a hopeful story, because it turns out Saroo is actually wrong about some of the things that are making him most depressed. It’s a story that plays to the audience’s emotions. But it’s a true story, one that gently invites us not to hold on so tightly to our private struggles and agonies, but to take the risk of trusting those who love us and long to listen to us. Somehow Saroo finds the courage to show his weakness, and recognise that he’s got his own story wrong. His is a long, hard journey. But it’s a journey into life.