To me, it is officially pit season! And since I was thinking about it, I wondered if there really is a pit season? The answer was yes! When I first tried googling it, all I got was information on The Pitt the TV show! It was all about how there had been seasons 1 and 2 and that there would be season 3! I tried again googling “pit the seed” and learned that the season for fruit with pits is May through October and the peak season is June to September. So why did I suddenly get so curious? It was because we saw a sign! A sign that alerted us to that peaches were for sale; that made us wonder where the peaches were from since we are kind of choosy about our peaches. When my husband learned that they were from South Carolina, of course he purchased some! They are the best! We have been enjoying peaches almost every day! Only the price keeps us from enjoying them more often! Peaches are easily the most favorite of all fruits for my husband! They even top watermelon for him and that is saying a whole lot for peaches!
I love to look at seed catalogues, and they almost always have a tree section. The apples and pears and berries are appealing but it’s the peaches that make my husband’s mouth water. There is nothing quite like biting into a peach, ripe off maybe your own tree, with the juice running down to your elbow while you’re still out in the yard. Years ago we lived with a backyard that had a peach tree and when summer came, it was a happy day when the first peach was ripe and ready to eat. It always amazes me how one tree can produce so many peaches. We were reminded of Paul’s exhortation on the “fruit of the Spirit” to the Christian church in Galatia. He wrote, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.” Galatians 5:22-23 NKJV. Just as peach trees are prolific in producing peaches, so too, the Holy Spirit is prolific in producing spiritual fruit. This fruit of the Spirit is not the result of human will or personal opinion. It’s not the product of man-made or man-approved theological beliefs, ceremonies, and rituals. Just as the fruit of a peach tree must be a peach, the fruit of the Spirit must be spiritual. It comes directly from God, not man.
The ultimate reason a peach tree produces fruit is to reproduce itself through the pits inside the peaches. Usually when preachers preach about the fruit of the Spirit, the focus is on being filled with the Spirit, which then bears the fruit of love, joy, etc., in your life. They never talk about the pits/seeds inside the fruit. But just as the peach has a pit/seed, so do the fruits of the Spirit.
When God causes the fruit of love to grow in your heart, there is a seed pit in that love that will grow and bear more love in the future. This is true with all the fruits of the Spirit. For example, when long-suffering reigns in you and you are patient with a friend, the seed/pit of long-suffering gets planted right there in the middle of things. You are not just sharing the fruit of patience with another person, you are also giving them a pit, a seed, which will grow and produce more patience in them.
This is true with all nine fruits of the Spirit. Each one always has a “seed/pit within itself” to perpetuate eternally the availability of this fruit. Take a minute to think about how God, in giving you the fruit of the Spirit, has also planted the seeds of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance in you and in others.
How many pits can you name? I thought of peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries and plums/prunes. I don’t have any love for nectarines and since they weren’t created by God, perhaps I’m a bit justified in not loving them. I have always enjoyed apricots though many think they are only good as dried fruit. Many years ago, when we lived in New Mexico, I was amazed that they were thought of as a trash tree. We saw them growing wild in wasteland and areas only good for grazing cattle. I asked why no one was using such nice fruit, only letting it fall to waste. No one minded when we harvested several large dishpans full of fruit and I canned it. We had fruit that we moved with us for years! Black cherries from Washington were always too expensive to be able to have very many and were a treasured taste that we could only rarely have. I was surprised to learn that our grandkids did not particularly think they were anything very special. Plums and pits always make me remember my childhood. My mother loved when she could purchase a couple of bushels of Stanley prunes to can. I loved them served with fresh cream from the top of the cold milk from our cows! It was so good! And when a plum gets dried it suddenly turns into a prune! Then I always have to remember my Daddy! He always kept a box of prunes in his car during trips. One prune with a pit could last him for what seemed like 30 miles! That pit was so clean when he finally declared it was time for a new one! No one wanted to invade his box of prunes! They were his and we didn’t like them!
That was all the pits that I could think of—until google reminded me that there was one more “pit”! Are you better than I am? The other well-known drupe—a stone fruit by definition—is the olive! And in our family, olives were also a favorite! What little kid doesn’t learn about olives by putting them on their fingertips before eating. What else were olives invented for? If you are like me, I thought that was all of the drupes! One more google and I added mangos and coconuts to my list! Also, dates(palms), coffee beans, almonds, walnuts, and pistachios, jujubes, and cashews. A drupe has an outer fleshy part that surrounds a single hard woody shell (pit) that does not split open to release the seed! A fruit pit is the hard, hidden core that holds tomorrow’s forest and tomorrow’s harvest. Though we often toss it away as waste, it is the most purposeful part of the fruit. In the quiet dark of the earth, the hard shell must break and surrender so that a new tree can rise. The pit has a hidden purpose! The hard shell is kind of like trials—they form a protective, tough exterior around our hearts, but God uses that pressure to safeguard a deeper work. Growth never happens on the surface; it begins when we are placed in unseen, quiet, and dark places, a silent burial so to speak. The pit cannot give life while holding tightly to itself; it must let go, surrender, to become something greater. Lord, when I feel buried or hard-pressed in a dark time, remind me that You are not punishing me—You are planting me. Help me to surrender my hardness, trust the quiet underground work, and believe that You can grow a harvest from this dark place.
Have you ever felt that perhaps you haven’t nurtured and taken advantage of the fruits of the Spirit as much as you should have? Or maybe you didn’t realize something was a gift from God until much later? Or perhaps you’ve missed opportunities that God sent your way and they slipped through your fingers? Or maybe you reacted too quickly or waited too long when God presented an opportunity, a blessing, or guidance? Those are all questions that I now have as I look back on my 70+ years of life. There have been times in my life, too many to count, when I did not follow God’s leadings and I lost an opportunity to bless someone. Other times I have been so enthusiastic about accomplishing a task that I acted a bit too fast and made a mess of things. But you just can’t peel back the petals of a peach blossom before it’s ready to bloom and expect to end up with a tasty piece of fruit. Nor do you pick the rotten fruit off the ground and put it in a serving bowl on your dining room table. Sometimes the wind knocks a few peaches to the ground when they’re still green. And sometimes I get so busy that I don’t get all the ripe fruit picked before it falls to the ground and rots. Last summer I got sad about wasting large amounts of apples. I have wasted too many opportunities.
The hard tough outer shell of the pit guards and protects the tender seed inside from harsh elements of weather and animals . Pits are buried in the dark, away from view, where nobody can see the quiet work of new growth happening. Pressure and time turn a discarded stone into a foundation for strength. God does not waste our dry or painful seasons; He uses them to build roots of patience and trust. What feels like a burial in your life may actually be a planting. Trust the Gardener while He works beneath the surface.
There are many pits in life! I can name several—armpits, snake pit, bottomless pit, pit of your stomach, orchestra pits, horseshoe pits, manure pits, ball pits, pothole pits, surgery pits, well pits, racing pits, Jacob’s well/pit. I heard that one dictionary had 30 entries for “pit.” Have you ever noticed how many pits there are in the Bible? These pits are not the pits of the fruits of the spirit! If someone had opened a business selling ladders in the Old Testament, they probably would have made a fortune. The pits can be seen nearly everywhere. Joseph gets thrown into a pit by his own brothers because apparently family reunions have always been complicated, even then. Jeremiah was lowered into a muddy cistern/pit where he sinks into the muck simply because he faithfully delivered God’s message. Jonah ran from God and spent time in the pit of the stomach of the big fish. Daniel spent the night in what is essentially a pit full of lions, which is not very high on my or anyone’s list of places to spend the evening. David wrote over and over about being in “the pit,” sometimes speaking literally, other times describing those seasons/ times where life feels so heavy that climbing out seems impossible. Even the story of Jesus ends with His body being placed in a rock-hewn tomb/pit before what became the greatest victory in history. The interesting thing is that the people in each pit almost never knew what God was doing while they were their “pits.” Joseph couldn’t see Egypt from the bottom of that hole. All he could see were dirt walls and the faces of brothers peering over the edge of the pit who had just decided his life was worth less than twenty pieces of silver. Jeremiah couldn’t see future generations reading his words while he was ankle-deep—or more accurately, waist-deep—in mud. Daniel couldn’t see the king running toward the lions’ den at daybreak so very early the next morning. From inside their individual pits, all they knew was that life had become very uncomfortable very quickly. It turns out pits have terrible visibility. You can’t usually see the next chapter while you’re living in the current one. You can’t see the way out. You can’t even look over the edge to see if help is coming. And maybe that’s part of the point.
Pits have a way of taking away everything except what actually matters for any of us, including me. “In the words of one of my favorite bloggers: Joseph lost his freedom. Jeremiah lost his comfort. Daniel lost any reasonable expectation of a peaceful night’s sleep. I don’t know exactly how much sleeping happened surrounded by lions, but I imagine every yawn probably got his attention. Yet none of them lost God. Jonah tried to lose God, God didn’t let him! The circumstances changed dramatically. God’s presence didn’t. It’s also interesting that God didn’t always keep His people from the pit. We like the idea of a God who stands at pit’s edge with a giant warning “Do Not Enter” sign. Instead, Scripture often shows a God who meets His people there in the pit. He was with Joseph before he became second in command of Egypt. He was with Jeremiah before anyone listened. He was with Daniel before the lions realized they weren’t getting supper that night. Sometimes God delivers us from our pits. Sometimes He delivers us through your pit. Those are not the same thing, but they’re both evidence that He hasn’t gone anywhere. I think that’s one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. We tend to assume that if life suddenly becomes dark, cramped, lonely, or uncomfortable, something must have gone terribly wrong. Yet over and over in the Bible, the pit isn’t proof that God has abandoned someone. It’s often the place where He’s preparing them for something they never could have imagined. Joseph’s pit eventually led to a palace. Jeremiah’s pit became part of a testimony that has encouraged believers for thousands of years. Daniel’s pit became a stage for God’s power. Even the tomb that held Jesus for three days became the place where death itself lost.”
Life is the pits sometimes! It seems that no matter how much you try, you lose! In my case—I had a surgery to fix the pain. Another even worse pain replaced it. Then came the need for additional surgery but not for the pain! The pain continued and I needed more surgery to fix that pain. And as soon as that healed, more surgery was suggested for another painful condition! It has seemed as though I could never get out of the pain pit! And as I write this, my life is once again painful enough that I can no longer walk more than a few limpy steps. The pit seems so very deep, and I can hardly see how I can ever get out of my pit. So, if you happen to feel like you’re in a pit today, like I do, remember this— throughout the Bible, pits have a remarkable habit of becoming places where God does some of His best work. They’re still miserable. But they usually aren’t the end of the story.
When life feels like the pits—days filled with sticky mud, dark days, huge scary open mouths and heavy disappointments—remember Psalm 40:2. “He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand” (NIV). God does not leave you down in the dark. He hears your cry, pulls you out of the slimy mess, and sets your feet on a solid rock. You might face sudden loss, a broken heart, or a heavy weight of sadness and grief and it is all very real pain. The mud of life makes it hard to move forward or see any light, and you are just stuck! A pit is often a tight space, but it is never the final chapter of your story. It’s not the end! Even when brothers/family betray or life breaks down, God sits with you—even in the dark and tears.
The pit is a place where you learn to stop leaning on your own strength and start trusting His big picture and let Him help you build your faith. He can lift us up out of the pit. Your dark time turns into a living proof of God’s grace for someone else who is hurting that you can share. Pain is real in my pit. You might face a sudden loss, a broken heart, or a heavy weight of sadness. God is the great lifter of our heads; He replaces despair with a firm place to stand. When God pulls you out, He places a brand-new song of praise and hope in your mouth.
I feel stuck in my pain. The mud and muck of life make it hard to move forward or see any light. Even when others betray or life breaks down, God sits with you in the pit of your darkness. I want to feel Him beside me in my pain. A pit is often a tight space, but it is never the final chapter of my pain story. The pit is a place where I must learn to stop leaning on my own strength and start trusting His big picture. Your dark time turns into a living proof of God’s grace for someone else who is hurting.
Sometimes you end up in a muddy pit and you can’t get out! It’s like being in thick mud and your shoe is stuck and you can’t move! God will lift you up! Don’t stay down! Don’t miss out!
I want to get out of my pit! My pit isn’t the end of my story!