What is a sinkhole?
Karst terrain is at the mercy of torrential or hard flowing waters that have no place to drain off the surface.
Karst rocks dissolve slowly under the ground unseen or detected by man. Water that is sitting on the surface and has no area to drain off slowly drains into the hole making it larger and larger overtime causing an underground pocket of empty space or a “hole” that slowly grows larger and larger until the surface above caves in.
Sometimes it finally has to give way because so much of the dirt and rocks have been washed out or dissolved and it does this naturally without humans effecting it, other times it can cave in with any kind of pressure or weight.
When the ground above the hole, whether dirt, clay, concrete, rocks, bricks, buildings, trees, or roads, plummets downward into the huge empty hole!
Then you have one big problem! A Sinkhole!
When it rains, you will notice that the rainwater seems to band together in ditches and lower lying areas to form small streams, sometimes even flooding the roads and causing serious problems. Rainwater always flows to lower ground.
Elijah had a great and wonderful experience on Mt. Carmel when he destroyed the enemies of God.
He told everyone he was the only one who served God.
He took 12 stones after the 12 tribes of Israel to build an altar to put his bull. Then he dug a trench that would hold about 9 gallons of water around it. He then had 12 barrels of water poured over his offering, and the water filled the trench.
It was pretty crazy that Elijah the Tishbite not only didn’t light the fire, but that he even drowned it with so much water that naturally, he nor anyone else could light it if they wanted to!
He wanted to prove to the worshipers of Baal, that not only was God real, but that His God, was the only true God. He had a lot of faith in God, so it wasn’t that Elijah wasn’t a strong Believer.
He saw fire come down from God himself to consume his offering! After the fire came down and consumed the offering and licked up all the water in the trench, you would have thought Elijah would have been amazed and cheering for joy!
But Elijah had a deeper struggle than that. He was discouraged.
No one knew about it but God.
God talked to Elijah after he felt so alone and sad that he went into a dark cave. God asked him what are you doing here, Elijah? And he stood up and left the depths of the dark cave and stood at the opening and told God how he was so excited about God and no one else was, and how he was at the point that he didn’t care if he lived or died. That’s pretty low, isn’t it?
You would have never known that Elijah was that sad and discouraged. He let inward thoughts eat away at his courage, and after such a huge victory he turned into a spiritual sinkhole!
Sometimes in life you think someone is just fine, when really inside it’s like they are experiencing a spiritual sinkhole. They are down and discouraged because they let discouraging thoughts creep into their minds and let the waters of discouragement dissolve their happiness inside.
May we be quick to notice when someone is down or discouraged and do our best to comfort, encourage, lift them up in the Lord, and not let Spiritual sinkholes happen!
