Get out of that Pit - Chapter 1

Get Out of that Pit - Our online study...Cliffs notes style.

(Feel free to add on)

Chapter 1: Life in the Pit

Book Excerpt

Life can be excruciating.  Crushing, in fact. The sheer magnitude of our worries can press down on our heads until we unknowingly descend into a pit of despair one inch at a time.  Something so horrible can happen that we conclude we’ll never be okay again.  We can blow it so badly we think God would just as soon we stayed under that dirt and out of His sight.  But, if we’re willing to let truth speak louder than our feelings, and long enough that our feelings finally agree, we can be far more than okay.  We can be delivered to a place where the air is crisp, the enemy is whipped, and the view is magnificent.

The Bible teaches that there are no lost causes.  (did you hear that, NONE) No permanent pit-dwellers except those who refuse to leave.  Every person can know the complete redemption of Jesus Christ, purpose for life, and fullness of joy.  No, life won’t ever be easy but the trade-off is a spin around Planet Earth that actually means something.

I waited patiently for the Lord to help me,

 and he turned to me and heard my cry.

 He lifted me out of the pit of despair...

  ...Many will see what he has done and be amazed.

  They will put their trust in the Lord. Psalm 40:1,3

Too often we don’t recognize a pit when we’re in one or we only think of it in terms of sin, so it doesn’t apply, but that’s not the case.

You’re in a pit when...

You feel stuck, trapped.  The only option is to misbehave, act out (i.e., have a kicking and screaming fit, hoping your flailing can help you escape) or submit (i.e., consider you made your own bed and decide to die in it.)

The first option is coping through life. It feels like a rut or going nowhere, stuck.  So we DO stuff to try to change our environment, be someone other than who we are or sink ourselves in activity or mindlessness to escape... all in the hopes of having excitement and fun, but more importantly to NOT feel the pit we are in.  You name it, it’s been tried by the multitudes.  Drinking, partying, being a workaholic, live an alternative life, turning a hobby into an obsession, watching loads of tv or movies...we could go on.

The second option, choose to accept the feeling of being trapped and stuck, become hopeless and resigned to the lie that this is as good as life gets because of some past choices or things that have happened to you.  You grow numb and cold.

Either way, they are the lies we buy into and we feel stuck in the pit.

You see and recognize what is right
      but refuse to act on it.
   You hear with your ears,
      but you don’t really listen.

  Because he is righteous,
  the Lord has exalted his glorious law.
 But his own people have been robbed and plundered,
  enslaved, imprisoned, and trapped.
  They are fair game for anyone
  and have no one to protect them,
  no one to take them back home.

 Who will hear these lessons from the past
  and see the ruin that awaits you in the future? Isaiah 42:20-23

You can’t stand up because you feel ineffective and utterly powerless against attack. Can’t stand up to assaults, trials, or temptations because your feet are in the mud and more.  You make an effort, but constantly feel like your losing ground, losing the fight.  It’s overwhelming and you feel flatly defeated at times. 

To the ancient Hebrew, a pit was a literal or figurative reference to the grave...so it’s like being the living dead.  Satan digs the pit in hopes he can bury you alive and keep you there. You become a rather ineffective person in life and relationships. Satan can’t make you stay nor will God make you leave.

 Deeper and deeper I sink into the mire;
 I can’t find a foothold. Psalm 69:2

Therefore, put on every piece of God’s armor so you will be able to resist the enemy in the time of evil. Then after the battle you will still be standing firm. Ephesians 6:13

You’ve lost vision and you’re impaired by the darkness.  Can’t see the obvious,  become stiff necked, to focused on our sinking feet. We can’t see out, so we turn our sights in.  Nearsightedness breeds hopelessness.  Dim vision ages us rapidly and we lose our childlikeness.  We can be young and yet feel old. Heavy laden. Burdened. In a pit where vision is lost and dreams are foolishness.  We don’t have a sense or understanding of meaning and purpose for our life.

Beth refers to the final book in the Narnia story, The Last Battle, where Susan , who in the first book witnessed the death and resurrection of the godlike lion Aslan, looked back on her times in Narnia as “funny games we used to play as children.”  Susan ultimately came to the conclusion that the heavenly land of her childhood experience was nothing more than a childish fantasy because she was a “jolly sight to keep on being grownup.”

Excerpt 2

Through the pages to come, some of you will recognize your pits.  For most of you awareness won’t come because you suddenly see how bad you are, but rather because you will wake up to how bored you are.  The lack of light and fresh air has lulled some of us to sleep.  Getting out begins with waking up.  And (this may be the hardest part) with being willing to feel again. In Psalm 40:2 David exclaimed,

He lifted me out of the pit of despair,
 out of the mud and the mire.
 He set my feet on solid ground
  and steadied me as I walked along. 

According to Psalm 27:6, high upon that very rock “my head will be exalted above the enemies who surround me.”  See what Satan has to lose when you get out of your pit?  Not only are wonder, hope and vision natural when our feet are set upon a rock, but so is our vantage point from which we can see the enemy’s activity around us.  (Incidentally, there’s no one on earth Satan would rather see in a pit than someone with godly vision.  Just ask Joseph.)

Are you bored with life?  Is life exhausting for you?  Does it seem like your just doing stuff to avoid the pit feeling?  Are you in a pit presently?

We’re going to talk more about the ways we get into pits and the ways we can get out in the coming weeks.

Ever feel like you're in an inescapable pit?

In the deepest parts of us, below the surface, no matter how hard our exterior shell is...those layers of armor and toughness to protect ourselves; we all want to be known and loved.  We don’t spend much time, if at all, talking about our deepest fears, our pains, our sorrows, or even our dreams, our desire for love and acceptance.  Perhaps we think it shows weakness, more likely we’ve been hurt and we don’t want to risk it again.  The people we love failed us, let us down, injured us, jaded our view of life.

Now you’re left empty and afraid; feeling lonely.  You may even be surrounded by people, friends, family...but there is a disconnect.  They don’t even know how bad it hurts.  They don’t know about the internal discontentment with life, the stirring in your soul for something more, something meaningful...they wouldn’t understand if you tried to tell them, at least you think.  So you smile and go along for the ride, but you’re slowly dying inside.

The love you seek is not what you think it is.  It’s not romance or even friendship; it is intimacy.  For your innermost self to be known by another; a deep relationship. To be accepted as you are and loved in spite of yourself; unconditionally.  Is there such a thing...does it exist?  We desperately want it to, what a relief that would be. 

However, the days roll on and the aching continues and grows.  It becomes unbearable at times and leaves your numb inside.  You’re just going through the motions.  There are moments when you just want to feel something, anything.  It doesn’t matter.  You feel trapped in your circumstances, tied down by the weight of what feels like a meager existence or perhaps the feeling that it will never get any better than what you have now.  You are desperate to break out, but from what?  You don’t really know. It’s a living nightmare in some ways; empty, empty, empty.  

You feel exhausted from just thinking about it.  Time to crawl into bed and escape into a dream.  Perhaps it’s worse, escape takes the shape of a bottle, a pill, a warm body...anything for some temporary relief.  Some short term pleasure, a fleeting moment of happiness, a distraction or even just forgetting about it for a short while - we cope.  If only that were enough, but it’s not. Matter of fact, it somehow makes it worse.  The void, the emptiness, gets bigger so we cling to our choice for coping even more.  We spend more time with it, increase the frequently...but it only intensifies our thirst for relief even further. Our coping mechanism might even be considered healthy by any standard, but it’s purpose and effect are the same.  It is a vicious cycle we can’t seem to break.  Something has to give.

In the mix of all of this we begin to feel a sense of worthlessness, insecurity...if we weren’t feeling that way already.  We become super sensitive to the words others use to define us.  Anything that sounds negative cuts like a knife inside of us.  We may not show it on the surface, we fight like mad to cover it up, but we hurt desperately.  Somehow it almost feels like we are unloved, even if others tell us differently.  We may even feel unlovable, flawed somehow...broken, unfixable.

Some days we don’t even think we deserve to be rescued from this mess or that it’s not possible.  Others we could practically cry out to be saved, please, at any cost!  Who do we cry out to, who can help us?  We’re frustrated...it seems hopeless.  Pointless to even try perhaps.

Every day our thoughts destroy us a little more, our perception of life as we see it.  We value our life, we value our family and our friendships.  We have expectations for the way these relationships should be.  Either what we have created in our own minds or perhaps what has been created for us on a tv show or movie.  There is this ideal picture; if we could only have that!  Everything would ok.  Instead, they seem hollow or superficial, disjointed, forced, painful...I don’t know.  They consume a lot of energy just to maintain and they are full of injury.  Over and over you’ve been burned, cast aside, made to feel insignificant, belittled, controlled, abused...and here we are again; worthless.

“Why can’t I find or change the circumstances, the person or people to make it all better?  To find relief and comfort” you ask yourself.  It feels like your running away, but from what and where to?  You don’t know, but the sensation won’t go away. So the question becomes, have you had enough? Are you ready to give up?  The hard truth is we’ve tried just about everything haven’t we...nothing is working.  Why? Because we are doing life our way and failing miserably at it.

You may have tried religion or spirituality.  Maybe you worked hard at being a good person and living an honest life.  You could have gone the route of living for the moment and doing whatever makes you happy and brings you pleasure.  Perhaps you are a Christian doing all the things Christians do; going to church, participating in Bible study, serving in ministry at the church.  Yet, with all these different ways of doing life...these feelings still plague you.

I have wrestled for a couple weeks now with this post sitting unfinished of how to bring the answers.  How can I boil down the solutions to one blog post, making it applicable?  Oh, believe me there is a way out, I know because I’ve been there too!  You don’t have to stay in this place any longer and the alternative is simply beautiful!

Beth Moore describes this sensation as being stuck in a mirky, muddy pit, being unable to escape.  That’s one good way of putting it.  As a matter of fact, I would like to explore the situation from this viewpoint as Beth writes about it in her book, “Get Out of That Pit.”  I propose you join me in an online study of the book over the next 10 weeks.  What  do you have to loose?

Go buy a copy at a Christian book store or order it online.  If you are not a Christian, don’t freak out on me!  I’m not asking you to join a religion...we gonna talk about this problem specifically and talk about relationship.  If you are a Christian, don’t freak out on me!  If you resonated with this entry then you don’t have it all figured out...good news, neither do I!  You’re in good company.  We’ll work on it together.  Also, I realize Beth Moore has been “branded” as women’s studies...get over it!  Send me a facebook message, email or blog comment if you might join me.  We’ll start in a week, so get to it!

Would you believe me- July 21, 2009

Dear friends and family,
I hope you are well. I am better than could possibly be imagined. If I told you that I have seen more miracles in the space of a few months than in the course of a lifetime, would you believe me? If I told you that every day, every single day without exception, I have encountered someone who by divine appointment was there to lift me up or for me to share my story with as encouragement or share the wisdom I have learned through counseling to help them in their troubles, would you believe me? What if I told you that EVERY time Satan threatens my hope and starts to cast the seed of doubt that I am rescued in that moment, that EXACT moment, by a song, a verse, a text message, a phone call, a passing stranger…I could go on. Would you believe me?

I ask because I’m not sure I would have believed myself a few short months ago that life could be lived in the space of His will so abundantly. Oh I’m not saying that I didn’t believe that God takes care of me, loves me or that I wasn’t walking with Him before. Now though, it’s as if I am truly alive in the way He always intended. Each day, every moment He permeates my thoughts, speaks loudly to my heart, calls me to action to speak boldly on His behalf by the Spirit. Can you identify with me?

I have a new understanding of relationship, of communion with the Lord. If there is anything we hold back and keep for ourselves; whatever we don’t give over to Him…it creates loneliness, separation. In our loneliness, we cope. We cope because we are not with God in this area, we are alone by our choices. We may have a healthy relationship otherwise except with this one thing we won’t give to Him.

Our coping takes many forms and usually as an overindulgence of something; food, entertainment, shopping, work, sports, exercise, romance novels, video games, pornography, affairs, etc. We are searching to remedy our loneliness and the stress that comes with it. Have I struck a chord? It did with me.

I share this with you not to condemn anyone, but to show you the path to freedom. I share this because I love you. Jesus and I are especially fond of you. :) You may not feel like you need this message, but maybe you know someone who does. Who am I to share this with you? I am nothing, I know little. My knowledge is limited, but His ways are great. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.

Would you believe me if I told you such things as these?

Sincerely with all my love,
Brian

Today’s song- Hillsong – You hold me now

On that day when I see
All that You have for me
When I see You face to face
There surrounded by Your grace

All my fears swept away
In the light of your embrace
When Your love is all I need
And forever I am free

Where the streets are made of gold
In Your presence healed and whole
Let these songs of heaven rise to you alone

No weeping, no hurt or pain
No suff'ring

You hold me now
You hold me now

No darkness no sickening
No hiding

You hold me now,
You hold me now

In this life I will stand
Through my joy and my pain
Knowing there's a greater day
There's a hope that never fails

When You're name is lifted high
And forever praises rise
For the glory of Your Name
I'm believing for the day

When the wars and violence cease
All creation lives in peace
Let these songs of heaven rise to you alone

No weeping, no hurt or pain
No suff'ring

You hold me now
You hold me now

No darkness, no sickening
No hiding You hold me now,
You hold me now

For eternity
All my heart will give
All the glory to Your name