My younger brother called me late to see how I was doing. I was not very good at all since just yesterday (well 1am last night) I became sick all of a sudden. Vomiting and diarrhea. Darn Elijah and his pooped self. I spent most of the day (well at least til 4pm) battling this gross predicament and sleeping. So when he called me I was a bit out of it. He was sorry that I was sick and hoped that I would get better soon. But then he mentioned something too terrible to even grasp. He even said it as if it were simply unfortunate rather than frighteningly serious. Something had happened with my older brother. He tried to kill himself? Jumping off a bridge in Ft. Myers? I don't remember anymore what he said. Or what my mom said when she called me a bit later. But apparently he is back in the V.A. hospital getting treated. Being medicated. Pulling back the demons that supposedly release themselves when he gets off of his medicine. This scares me because I don't understand it. I know he was in the war and it must have been very traumatic. Emotionally-devastating really for any young man to experience. And he doesn't want to ever talk about it or deal with it. I feel like the V.A. just feeds his denial and depression by simply prescribing some shot or pills as some kind of lasting solution to emotional trauma and pain. But it doesn't work. That shit never works. It just goes to show how tragic a war really is. Both for the physical casualties lost overseas and the emotional ones left here to suffer, almost in silence and neglect. It deeply pains me to not know what to do for my older brother. He is like a shell of a person I once knew. Gosh, just writing that down is hard. But it is the truth. He really is trapped inside a mind of turmoil and defeat. Loss, anguish, terror, fear, anger, pain, shock, I don't know the list could go on. It's like he is just existing. My younger brother doesn't know what to do for him. And my mom's answer is just to have the V.A. look after him. But that won't prevent him from relapsing and possibly trying to kill himself again. He has lost hope. Or perhaps he never really had any in the first place. This makes me sad because I know that there is a Hope for him if only he could see it. If only my whole family could see it. I am such a different person from who I used to be, and that is solely because of Jesus. I want my family to be freed and saved by the grace of God. I want them to meet Jesus for real and put their faith in Him. I wish we weren't so broken or disconnected from each other. I sometimes wonder if they ever will believe. It's a scary thought, one that leads me to pray. Pray for God's miraculous love and power to touch each of them personally. Pray for the Holy Spirit to embolden me to speak about the love of Christ with them. It's so hard. It's so much easier to just forget or ignore my family. But then something like this happens and I am again awakened to the reality that death is real, that there is an ultimate, eternal state for each of us. I want that state to be with Jesus for every person in my family. My older brother cannot kill himself because he has a heavenly Father who has never let him down, who has never stopped loving him and who alone has the right to take life from him. My prayer is that God would protect his life and call him to faith. That Jesus would expose the demons that plague his psyche and rescue him from them, like He did with those in the Scriptures. There is a spiritual battle that goes on inside the heads of countless veterans long after they return from battle in a war. My brother may still be enduring this and struggling with how to deal with what I know must be a terrifying (all the more so because he is yet blind to the realities of God and Satan) and paranoid delusion, but I trust that Jesus hears me when I cry out for Him to intervene and be with my brother there in the West Palm hospital or his Clewiston apartment. He is good. He is gracious. He is powerful. He is sovereign. He is a God that saves and is saving.