Sifting through all the bandwidth, newsprint and air time that’s been devoted to every last detail of Robin William’s death – and on depression and suicide in general – I believe I’ve found that one article that’s more worthwhile than all the other coverage put together: “Angel of the Gap” by Dr. Benjamin Wiker, at To the Source.
 
 
“The Gap” in this story is located at the tip of the South Head peninsula at the far eastern edge of Sydney Harbor, New South Wales. It’s a huge cliff looming over the Pacific Ocean that for years has been an unfortunate magnet for despairing souls seeking to end their lives.
 
But the good news is that many of those who arrived at that precipice over the last several decades didn’t make that tragically final leap as planned. Not after they encountered an angel anyway. An angel named Don Ritchie ~

He died in 2012. For the last fifty years he lived just a few yards from the Gap, or more accurately, from the notorious Watson’s Bay Cliff. For fifty years he’s saved lives, not ten or twenty, but hundreds.
 
Since 1964, when he moved into his house on Old South Head Road, he’s been watching out his window. At the beginning, he’d run out and physically hold them back—one time, even tackling someone—while his wife Moya called in the police. But then later he started inviting them into his house to talk—”for tea,” as the Australians say.

Missing from the video, and other secular accounts of Don’s story, is really the most important element; his faith.
 
As Dr. Wiker relates, most versions of Ritchie’s life-saving experiences fail to mention – or even wonder about – the man’s motivation.

But why did he do it—he and his wife Moya? Fifty years of watching.
 
The press didn’t say. Nothing they quoted from the Angel of the Gap gave much of a clue. It was just as if he was a regular guy, giving jumpers a reason to live by giving them a cup of tea.
 
How nice.
 
But people don’t jump for lack of tea, and people don’t spend fifty years saving others, hovering over the Gap, due to a slight excess of niceness. The press also skipped over the fact that he very often risked his own life, climbing over the safety fence so he could get to them.
 
The secular press accounts lacked depth—the real depth of the despair of those who wanted to jump, and the real depth of the Angel standing at the Gap for half a century and snatching them.
 
What was Don Ritchie saying to those who, crushed by blackness within, were about to jump into the blackness below?
 
What would Don Ritchie have said to Robin Williams?
 
The more I read, the less I knew.

 
Here’s what Dr. Wiker discovered about Don and his wonderful life story – so much more inspiring than anything our celebrity-obsessed culture has to offer ~

I finally came across a clue. Witness the words of Father Tony Doherty:
 

“I met him forty years ago. It was at Watsons Bay, I was driving home at about 1am. There were a group of guys at the Gap. I edged my way in tentatively… Here’s a figure who was lying down on his stomach, talking to a terrified little Vietnamese chap, who was just over the edge and threatening to jump. I watched this figure gradually encourage him to come back to the safety of the cliff. He has this wonderful soft, appealing voice that encouraged this little fellow not to jump, it turned out to be Don.”

 
Hanging over the edge of a cliff at 1 a.m., slowly, carefully, sweating every second.
 
What the press didn’t mention was that the Angel of the Gap was a Christian.
 
I wondered if the secular press avoided this at all costs? Perhaps they didn’t want to let it be known that just perhaps, the Angel of the Gap was motivated not by the limpid deity of niceness, but the God of Abraham, the God of David, the God made flesh in Jesus Christ.
 
“Aha!” I thought. Now I believe I know why he did it, and what he was so gently saying at the edge of the cliff, and during tea at his house. He knew there was something more than mere comfort, mere pleasure, fame and fortune—something deeper, something better.
But if you take that something out, there’s only a voracious black depth beyond the shimmering promise on the surface.
 
We don’t want to admit that despair can be so black and so deep, that only God can lift us out, because that would be to admit that modern secular life, which would seem to offer every physical benefit, every pleasure, every intoxicating fantasy, leaves us in the end writhing in agony in a darkness that all too often engulfs precisely those who, like Robin Williams, seem to have it all.
 
If money and material success and fame cannot make us happy and keep us happy, as the secular gospel proclaims, then maybe we just might be open to listening to a wonderful, soft appealing voice, a still small voice like Don Ritchie’s.