“Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.”

Matthew 7:6 ESV

In the allegorical “The Pilgrim’s Progress” there is a swamp called “the Slough of Despond” where Pilgrim gets hopelessly stuck. Well, we were stuck — two girls hopelessly stranded on top of a doghouse, with an enormous angry pig stomping around below.

I was a kid from the outer edge of the suburbs who spent a fair bit of time with my rural family on weekends and summers. My experiences were a hodgepodge of suburban and rural. I wasn’t completely citified, but neither did I know very much about the finer details of raising livestock. My cousins were fully immersed in rural life. They hunted, fished, shot competitively and raised goats, pigs, rabbits and even had a couple of llamas. There was a part of me that wished I wasn’t just a part time inhabitant of their world.

On one particular day, I did get a pretty immersive experience. My cousin Crystal and I were probably in late elementary school. Raising pigs for 4H meant that not only did they have their show pig, but they had a large sow who gave birth to them, and apparently Uncle Jimmy decided that that sow needed some exercise and that Crystal and I were the ones to do the exorcising — er exercising. So, armed with a couple of pig whips, we went out to walk that pig.

The problem, as you may have guessed, was that we were small girls, and this was a large pig who, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn’t want to be walked. Our attempts to steer her away from her comfortable pig shed (and food trough) were met with indignation. After several minutes of driving her — pitching and swaying — along, she had had enough.

With an angry squeal she turned on us, kind of like when the demons entered the pigs and they ran off the cliff in the bible. She stepped on Crystal’s foot, knocked us over and chased us as we scrambled to the nearest refuge available — the dog house. We were terrified to come down, but everyone else was in the house, so we yelled and yelled until her dad finally heard us and rescued us and made that pig go for a walk.

So, I guess the lesson is, when the sow of despond has you stuck on the doghouse, call on your father, who can handle the things you can’t.

“Ask,  and it will be given to you;  seek, and you will find;  knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened…If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Matthew 7:7,8, 11