Chances are that you remember exactly where where you were nineteen years ago today, on September 11, 2001. 

I can recall with remarkable detail the bedroom in our little house where I received the call from my friend Ira: ​“Have you seen the news?”

When tragedy strikes, whatever space we find ourselves becomes a memorial. The traumatic event force-clicks the shutter of our mind’s camera and creates an indelible image. We don’t control these moments. We only choose how to walk through them. Even then, we often find we are not as strong as we think we are.

Pastor Juanita Rasmus remembers the day her interior world came crumbling down. ​“The Crash,” or what her counselor labeled a ​“major depressive episode,” was a dark time, but one from which she would later mine treasures. 

“Hitting my own bottom of depression,” she writes, ​”enabled me to come to an amazing awareness: I had been sourcing my life from an illusion…I needed a deeper reality.”

She discusses that experience in a candid conversation with Nathan Foster on the Renovaré Podcast, and in her new book, Learning to Be. (Check out an excerpt we published this week, God’s Crash Course.)

When the bottom falls out, she points us to things we can do to move toward healing: starting with admitting our powerlessness and looking to Jesus our Source, and slowing down to spend time with God in nature and unhurried Scripture meditation.

Father, the very nature of dark times means we can’t see very well. Illuminate the treasures to be found there, and give us the courage to cooperate with You in digging them up.