In Which I Reveal that I dislike the word PIT

It’s true.

I can’t STAND the word “pit.”

I have been having a bit of a struggle lately with my attitude and adjusting to things going on in my life and with my family.

A friend from work suggested that I read a book by Beth Moore called “Get Out of That Pit” and I mentioned my disdain for the last word in the title.

“Well, it’s BIBLICAL,” Donna Jo said.

“I know it’s Biblical, missy,” I replied. “But I just think there could be a better word. Something not quite so dirty. Something that doesn’t make me wrinkle my nose when I say it.”

“Well, missy, I think you can just get over not liking the word, because that’s the word. Period.”

We call each other “missy” a lot, if you can’t tell.

And really, the more I think about it, the more I realize that the word I dislike so much - the word that refers to those deep, dark parts of our lives - it should be something that makes us wrinkle our noses, something that makes us just a little bit uncomfortable. Because the fact of the matter is that we don’t have any business, as Christians, hanging out in, well, pits.

(I totally just wrinkled my nose.)

When I started reading Get Out of That Pit, I was a little detached, honestly; Beth (and I say that like she’s my BFF and we shop for shoes together, but I just can’t bring myself to call her “Mrs. Moore”) mentions that that there are essentially three means to pit-dwelling: being thrown in, slipping in, and jumping in. And as I read through the chapter that covered that first point, I could wholly relate. There have been times in my life when I’ve been thrown in a pit by something someone else has done, but that’s not where I am right now but only by the Grace of my Heavenly Father.
Then I got to the second route to the pit: slipping in.

And I may have done that a time or two hundred.

You know the drill: you tippy toe! tippy toe! over to something that you have no business messing with - an old hurt, an old habit, an old hang-up. You mess with it a little - and then you step back. Then you mess with it a little bit more, and you back away again - but maybe not quite as far away as you did before. And gradually, slowly but surely, you slip back into the depths of that particular thing. Instead of keeping a healthy distance away from it, you’re all up in the middle of it. Back in the dead-center of the pit.

I’d like to think, as a fairly intelligent 40-something woman, that I’m immune to doing anything so stupid, to doing anything so self-destructive. But I do - and Satan loves it, no doubt.

There are two areas of my life that have been consistent battlegrounds: discipline and trust. The biggest way the discipline issue manifests itself is with my ongoing battle with weight (sidenote: DON’T GET ME STARTED, but as I told Donna Jo in an email the other day, I would like to lose 40 pounds in the next two weeks, so if she needs to find me I’ll be right here starving myself. Which I WON’T, of course. I was just kidding. But sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying, and I’m just keepin’ it real, interpeeps. And now I’m fearful of getting emails telling me YOU DON’T HAVE TO STARVE YOURSELF and PLEASE, WOMAN, EAT SOME CHICKEN, so let me just reiterate for clarity that I was kidding).

The trust thing is an issue that I thought cropped up for the first time in my 20’s, but I’ve really dealt with it my whole life, I think. If I’m not careful I can find myself doing terribly productive things like Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop, and the older I get the more I realize that it’s a pit custom-designed for me, a trap that Satan uses to steal my natural bent towards joy. I’ll think I’m over it, that I’m done with it, that I’m not going to worry about such-and-such ANY MORE - and then BAM! - I seize up like a rusty motor.

If rusty motors actually “seize,” that is. I’ve never been very strong with the figurative language. But you know what I mean.

So in the end, I think the biggest thing Beth’s book did for me is to remind me that these pits that continually beckon me are spiritual battles, and I can’t fight them in my own strength. I try - but at the end of the day, “willpower” is just another word and not a bit of help in terms of climbing out of the pits into which I sometimes slide. What I need instead is His power, because if you get right down to it, there really aren’t any battles that we’re meant to fight alone.

I awaited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry. He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a Rock, and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord. Blessed is that man that maketh the Lord his trust, and respecteth not the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies.
Pslam 40:1-3