09/08/2026
Growing up, my sisters and I and the neighbor kids had a lot of forts in the woods behind our houses. And when I say forts, please understand these were not purchased plastic playhouses with shutters and a slide. These were elaborate architectural achievements constructed from sticks, ferns, random boards, optimism, and absolutely no building permits. We had trails between them. We had territories. We added rooms. We relocated things. We apparently had an entire woodland development company operating with zero funding, zero engineering knowledge, and a labor force made entirely of children whose parents just knew we were “in the woods somewhere.” It was a different time.
Sometimes we all got along beautifully. Boys and girls working together, building forts, exploring trails, enjoying nature like a wholesome childhood movie where eventually somebody's family dog would show up.
Other times it was girls versus boys and things got slightly more...Old Testament.
I don't remember exactly what started every conflict, but I do remember there were times when the boys would destroy something the girls had built. And naturally, we responded with all the maturity, grace, diplomacy, and conflict resolution skills you would expect from a group of children unsupervised in the woods. We could have talked about our feelings. We could have rebuilt. We could have involved an adult. We could have acknowledged that perhaps a building constructed primarily from dead branches and ferns did not have a reasonable life expectancy to begin with.
Instead, apparently one of us looked at the deteriorating diplomatic relationship between the boys and girls and said, “Have we considered concealed excavation?”
We dug a trap.
An actual trap.
As in a hole. In the ground. On a trail where we thought the boys would walk. Then we covered it with sticks and ferns and dirt until it looked reasonably ground adjacent and waited.
Before anyone becomes concerned about the childhood survival rate in our neighborhood, it was actually quite good.
This was not a tiger pit.
There were no sharpened sticks. There were no boulders suspended from trees. Nobody was going to disappear into a twelve foot hole while the girls quietly divided up his fort assets. We were children with whatever digging equipment we could find, and apparently our desire for revenge was considerably stronger than our upper body endurance. I think the hole was maybe a foot deep at best.
We weren't trying to injure anybody.
We just wanted one of the boys to be walking confidently through the woods and then suddenly discover that the earth had withdrawn approximately twelve inches of support.
And one did.
The system worked.
One of the boys walked over our carefully engineered section of ground adjacent forest floor, went through it, dropped approximately one foot, and was basically adequately confused.
Which was really the entire mission objective.
Nobody was injured. Nobody needed rescuing. There was no screaming. Just one boy who had been walking at normal elevation and was now unexpectedly standing slightly below grade wondering what exactly had just happened to the earth.
Meanwhile, the girls nearby were absolutely delighted.
We didn't want casualties.
We wanted confusion.
And maybe a little mud.
Apparently we didn't hold grudges.
We launched infrastructure projects.
And the thing is, we put actual effort into this. We dug the hole. We gathered the sticks. We arranged the ferns. We added dirt. We checked the camouflage. There was apparently quality control. You couldn't just throw a branch across it and call it good because even as children bent on revenge, we had standards. It needed to look like ground. Not necessarily good ground. Just ground adjacent enough that a boy moving at normal boy speed wouldn't stop and think, “Interesting. That particular square of forest floor appears to have been recently engineered by hostile forces.”
It worked exactly once.
Which, frankly, is a better success rate than some government infrastructure projects.
And somehow, looking back at this highly questionable chapter of my childhood, Proverbs 26:27 has become one of those verses that feels unnecessarily personal: “Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and a stone will come back on him who starts it.”
Well.
Excuse me, Solomon.
There are more than 31,000 verses in the Bible and apparently one of them needed to specifically address the possibility that a few young girls in the woods of Whatcom County would respond to property damage by establishing a covert excavation division.
I feel seen.
Unfortunately, though, the verse isn't really about a twelve inch hole covered in ferns. It's about something we're remarkably good at continuing to do as adults, except now we generally leave the shovels out of it.
Somebody hurts us, so we want them to hurt too. Somebody says something about us, so we keep one little piece of information about them in our back pocket. Somebody embarrasses us, so we quietly wait for the opportunity to return the favor. Somebody damages something we care about and suddenly we're mentally gathering sticks and ferns because we would just like them to experience a small, educational loss of altitude.
And then Jesus comes along in Matthew 5:44 with, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Which is significantly less satisfying in the immediate moment than watching your childhood adversary unexpectedly disappear one foot into the forest floor.
I'm just saying.
But that's the thing about retaliation. You think you're making life miserable for somebody else, but you're the one doing all the work. You're carrying the shovel. You're digging the hole. You're gathering the sticks. You're carefully arranging the ferns. You're spending your time crouched emotionally behind a tree waiting for someone else to have a bad day.
Meanwhile they may be somewhere completely unaware of the entire operation, eating a Popsicle.
God isn't saying what somebody did to you was okay. Forgiveness doesn't make wrong things right. Loving your enemy doesn't mean handing them another stick and inviting them to come destroy the replacement fort. Boundaries are still allowed. Wisdom is still allowed. But God also doesn't want us spending our lives maintaining an elaborate network of emotional b***y traps for everyone who has ever hurt us.
At some point, you have to put down the shovel.
Because eventually our fort wars ended. We grew up. The forts disappeared. The woods changed. I don't remember what the boys destroyed. I don't remember exactly why we were mad. But I do remember digging that hole, covering it with ferns, and one unsuspecting boy suddenly becoming approximately twelve inches closer to sea level.
And maybe that's the part worth thinking about.
Sometimes years later you won't even remember why you were angry, but you'll remember how much of yourself you spent being angry. How much time you spent digging. How many sticks and ferns you gathered. How long you waited for somebody else to fall.
So maybe put down the shovel. Pray for them. Forgive what you can. Give God the parts you can't figure out yet. Keep building instead of destroying. Let Him handle justice.
And if you're currently considering digging an actual hole, covering it with sticks, ferns, and dirt, and hoping someone who offended you experiences an unexpected twelve inch reduction in elevation, Proverbs has apparently already addressed this situation with disturbing specificity.
Also, for legal purposes, childhood me cannot provide additional construction advice.
But I can confirm the prototype worked.
He was adequately confused.
And really, that was all we were asking for.
