The pit is not Your Punishment

Nobody tells you about the pit.

They tell you about the breakthrough. The promotion. The launch. The moment everything clicked.

What they don't tell you is what came before.

Joseph in the cistern before the palace.

David in the cave before the throne.

Paul in Arabia before the missionary journeys.

Jesus in the wilderness before the ministry.

Every single one. A pit before a platform.

This is the pattern of Scripture. And nobody wants to talk about it because it doesn't fit the brand of the modern church.

The Day Before Everything Fell Apart

January this year, the day before I ended up on an emergency surgery table in Lisbon, Portugal, my wife and I drove out to a little town called Sintra.

There's a place there called Quinta da Regaleira. It's a 19th-century estate built by a wealthy man with an obsession for symbols and meaning. The grounds are full of hidden tunnels and underground passages.

The centerpiece is something called the Initiation Well.

It's not a well in the functional sense. No water. No bucket. It's a ceremonial structure. A spiral staircase carved nine levels into the earth.

I stood at the top and looked down into the dark. And something in me recognized what I was seeing.

This was the descent.

I started walking down. Each level felt heavier than the last. Not physically. Something else. The weight of everything I'd been carrying for years. The pressure I'd been calling discipline. The discomfort in my body I kept brushing off.

I didn't know that within twenty-four hours I'd be in a hospital bed, barely conscious, with a Portuguese surgeon standing over me saying, "We need to operate now or you risk losing function permanently."

But the well had already told me what was coming.

You Don't Climb Back Up

Here's what makes the Initiation Well different from a normal staircase.

When you reach the bottom, you don't climb back up.

You exit through the mountain.

There's a tunnel at the base. A passage carved through the rock that leads out somewhere completely different. The descent is one-way. The way back doesn't exist.

I stood at the bottom and felt something I didn't have language for yet.

The way forward is never the way back.

The version of me that walked down those stairs was not going to be the version that walked out. The old operating system, the one fueled by pressure, performance, and pretending I had it all together, was already failing.

The surgery just made it physical.

Why We Resist the Descent

Most believers, the second they sense the pit coming, do everything possible to avoid it.

They work harder. They push through. They pretend it's not happening. They quote verses out of context to medicate the fear. They blame circumstances, other people, the enemy, anyone but the possibility that God might actually be the one doing the stripping.

I get it. I did all of it.

But here's what Scripture keeps showing us, over and over.

God's chosen path of formation almost always runs through the wilderness.

"He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna... to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord." (Deuteronomy 8:3)

He humbled. He caused hunger. To teach.

That's not punishment. That's preparation.

But culture, even Christian culture, has trained us to interpret the descent as failure. So we resist what God is using to transform us. And we miss the whole point.

The Pit Is Not the End

Joseph spent years in a pit, then in slavery, then in a prison cell on a false charge. From the outside, his life looked like a series of disasters.

From God's perspective, it was a custom-built training program for a man who would one day save nations from famine.

Genesis 50:20. "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives."

Notice he doesn't say God allowed it. He says God intended it.

That's a hard verse for the prosperity gospel. But it's one of the most freeing verses in Scripture for anyone currently in a pit.

What's happening to you might be exactly what's happening for you.

The Stripping Is the Gift

Before Portugal, my wife and I went through what we now call "the trailer season." Eighteen months living in a 28-foot travel trailer parked in a church lot. Every door we tried, closed. Every logical path forward, blocked.

I had built my whole life on a simple equation: work hard enough, smart enough, long enough, and you can make things happen.

The trailer proved otherwise.

No amount of effort was going to force a door open that wasn't supposed to open yet. I tried. Believe me. Spreadsheets. Calls. Hustle. Nothing moved.

What started to sink in, slowly, painfully, one cold night at a time, was this:

Most of the important things in life cannot be forced into existence. You don't bully them into happening. You wait. You align. You respond.

That idea is so counter to how I was wired that it took eighteen months in a trailer to drill it into my soul.

The stripping wasn't punishment. It was preparation.

The descent wasn't failure. It was formation.

If You're In It Right Now

If you're reading this in the middle of a season that feels like everything is being taken away, I want you to hear something.

You are not failing. You are being initiated.

The pain is real. The uncertainty is real. The fear that you won't make it out is real. I'm not dismissing any of that.

But the descent is not the end of your story. It's the beginning of a different one.

The pit is not your punishment.

It's your preparation.

And what God is forming in you in the dark is worth more than what He's removing.

What's Coming

This whole concept, what I call the Descent and the Release Principle, is one of the core sections in my upcoming book, Peace Not Pressure.

If you want to be notified when it releases (and get a free chapter):

Click → Peace Not Pressure Book
 
You don't climb back up.

You come out through the mountain.

And what comes out is worth what it cost to get there.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — There's an old phrase in Scripture: "weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning." (Psalm 30:5) Notice the weeping has a timeline. It stays for the night. It does not stay forever. If you're in the night right now, that is not your forever address. Hold on.