I have spent much of 2022 in a pit.
I don’t say that to alarm you. I share it because it’s true.
On one particularly hard day, my husband was also struggling to hope and he said jokingly, “I need you to throw me a rope, so I can climb out of this pit.”
I said “Dude, you’re standing on my shoulders.”
And so we wallowed in the pit together.
Fun times.
While I don’t have three easy steps to climb out of the darkness, I can tell you that deep pits that threaten to destroy us can become deep wells that we draw strength from.
The deeper the well, the more likely the water. The only difference between a pit and a well is iwater. Sometimes we have to go deeper in our pain , circumstances, trust— to hit the bottom.
Living water brings life and turns pits into wells. Thomas Fuller says, “We never know the worth of water until the well is dry.”
A couple of years ago, a friend who was moving out of state, gifted me her 8 foot fiddle leaf fig tree. I was a fairly new plant lady, but I knew the value of the beautiful tree. It became my goal to keep the plant alive. I watered it weekly, sprayed its leaves so they would shine and fed it special food.
It mostly thrived that first year, but I noticed it wasn’t growing straight and seemed weak. Here’s what I learned: Fiddle Leaf Figs in particular, can grow quite weak and do not support themselves very well as the lack of wind indoors means that they do not strengthen over time. Grabbing the trunk and simulating a “storm” or wind a few times a week, can strengthen them.
The harder the wind blows the deeper our roots grow.
God uses the pits and storms to strengthen us.
Welcome the wind. Make peace in the pit. Wade in the well. See the storm for what it is: an opportunity to drink from Living Water and never thirst again.
The other day someone asked me if I was still in a deep pit… I told them it’s all in how you look at it.
Tomorrow, I head back to Kenya with Mercy House Global. It seems fitting that I share that here since this is where my journey of obedience began almost 13 years ago.
If you haven’t RSVP’d for the event, you can do that for free. You will hear first-hand testimony from some beautiful teen moms, artisans, and empowered women who have turned their pits of despair into wells of hope.
