In our youth, sleep comes easily. Those precious minutes after our heads hit the pillows and before we drift off to sleep were frequently filled with joyous imaginations and rosy possibilities—“What new excitement will tomorrow bring?”
Yet, for one little 8-year-old, each night was just a harbinger of another awful morning to come. One night in second grade, he asked God to take his life.
Heaven Must Be Real
Artist Russell Ricks was born with complete agenesis of the corpus callosum (CACC)—a neurological disorder in which the nerve bundle connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain is completely missing. Though Ricks’s brain compensated by creating other pathways to transmit information, he still had difficulties with social and mental processing.
Due to this condition, Ricks struggled in school and was looked down upon by his peers. He was frequently bullied and beaten. In a time when learning disabilities were not understood, all his parents could tell him was, “You’ve just got to toughen up and deal with it.”
“When kids were picking teams to play, everyone would say, ‘No, I don’t want Russell!’ So, when I wasn’t physically beaten, I was emotionally beaten. Nobody wanted to be my friend. They called me a retard and tease me on and on,” Ricks recounted on the podcast Round Trip Death.
As he lay in bed that night, terrified of the school year to come, Ricks thought about his baptism a week prior. He had felt the presence of God—"a special feeling that was comfortable, good, peaceful, and calm.”
Then, his mind drifted further back, to the single clear memory of his babyhood.
Ricks’s mother had been a gifted soprano and was on the verge of signing with The Warner Brothers when she decided to give up her career and raise a family.
“She raised seven kids and would sing to us every day. For a period of time, whenever she sang, I saw people dressed in white come into our home and surround her. They’d linger for a while and after a few songs they would leave,” Ricks said.
“I remembered being frustrated with my family because they couldn’t see what I saw. I was too young to talk but I wanted to ask, ‘Who are these people?’ After a while, I just decided that they were relatives who had passed on but came to visit because they enjoyed my mom’s music.”
In that line of thought Ricks reasoned, “If what I felt at my baptism was God, and those people dressed in white came from heaven—then God must be real!” Therefore, if anyone can end the bullying, it would be God.
Ricks fell onto his knees and begged.
“Heavenly Father, I need your help, I can’t face another day like this. So, either you’ve got to take this away or take me away.”
In Ricks’s mind, he had just been baptized, so his slate was clean. If there ever was a perfect time to die, this would be it.
He said to God, “I know it’s wrong for me to take my life but if you do it—then it’s okay. I’m begging you to end my mission on earth and let me go to a place where I’ll be safe, loved, and not have to face the abuse.”
After his prayers, little Ricks climbed back into bed and cried. Then, just as he was giving in to sleep, the room began to spin.
