There are times in life that stress isn’t even the right word. I was having one of those moments. My wonderful, awesome brother had been taken to the mental hospital, and nothing was making any sense in what had once been what I considered my life. I had thought of many ways my life might go. This was not one of them.
For anyone who’s ever had a close family member fall prey to mental illness, you know that when things get out-of-whack in their world, yours starts making less and less sense as well. Things you took for granted are no longer reliable. Things that seemed so obvious before suddenly look totally different, and there is no way to get them into logical order.
I knew Raef had been struggling. I had known for quite some time. But the mental hospital? That just was so out of anything I could’ve imagined so as to be surreal. But he was there, and not going was out of the question. Now I didn’t know how in the world I would ever be able to walk into that place—what would I say? What could I say? What would it be like? What would he be like?
In the midst of the swirling questions, I reached for the One constant in my life—my Savior and Friend. “God, I don’t know about this. I really don’t. How am I supposed to trust you even now?”
It seemed such a simple question, and it had an even simpler answer.
Patiently, lovingly the answer came back to me. “No. Not even now… especially now.”
Since that day I’ve had a lot of Especially Now moments.
There are many things I do not understand about this life—why things happen, why they happen to who they happen to, what we do when horrible things happen to wonderful people in our lives. What I do know is that in those most confusing of moments, we have a friend who is holding out his hands and whispering, “Trust Me… especially now.” (2007)
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