Hope Is the First DoseSample

“The Pit”

Shortly after my insights about the Lamenter and Asaph, I was reading Scripture, and tears were flowing, when I noticed a verse that I’d somehow missed before. In Psalm 28, David prayed,

Please, don’t turn Your ear from me.

If You respond to my pleas with silence,

I will lose all hope like those silenced by death’s grave. (verse 1)

This was the moment when I realized that trauma puts us down in the pit, lying to us that God is silent. Trauma tells us we will not survive, that darkness is our only friend, that we are doomed. God has turned his ear, isn’t speaking to me, isn’t listening to me, won’t even look at me.

And in that exceptional moment, the Great Physician gave me the first real dose of hope I’d had in years, by reminding me of another verse that was written by the same suffering man, David, in Psalm 139:

Can I go anywhere apart from Your Spirit?

Is there anywhere I can go to escape Your watchful presence?

If I go up into heaven, you are there.

If I make my bed in the realm of the dead, you are there. (Verses 7-8)

Some translations use the word “pit” to describe the dead place to which David is referring. The Hebrew word is Sheol, the realm of all dead things.

Our choice is not whether we will become like those who go down to the pit; trauma sends us there against our will. Our choice is whether we believe that God is silent or absent. If we stay in that darkness, it will swallow us. It’s where some people who have had a TMT get stuck, when they allow the loss or the event to become more real than the voice of God. Like the tormented soul in Edvard Munch’s classic painting The Scream, their hands are clasped over their ears, shutting out the voice of God.

Trauma pitches us into the pit. Will we stay there?

Has God seemed silent to you lately? Spend time today in prayer, listening as well as speaking.