Debt: It's like a 5 1/2 ft tall person drowing in a 6 ft pool.

I've been thinking about what having debt is like. One illustration I've been wanting to share with a friend who keeps piling on the debt is that debt is like being a 6 foot tall person slowly drowning in a 5 1/2 foot pool. Here's my thinking:

Imagine you have a pool of water six feet deep all the way through. You are five and a half feet tall so you jump in, trying to cool off on a hot summers day. What you don't realize when you jump in is that there is no ladder to get out, and the lip at the top of the pool that reaches up too high for you to get out. You are half-treading water and half-bouncing your feet off the bottom. That's fine for a while, but at some point you begin to get tired. At that point you discover there is no one to help you out. I wouldn't want to be in that position. And yet I am.

The kind of debt I'm in is just like that. Seems do-able at first, maybe even kind of cool. But after a while of treading water, usually not even touching bottom, I've found myself very very tired. At times I feel like giving up. At times I feel like maybe the water level is going down. And then it rains.

I have a friend in the same position I am in. Drowning in debt. The difference is that she keeps adding water to her pool- and is pretending the water levels aren't getting deeper. Now in real-life in my illustration adding water would be the key to escape. Simply fill the tank to the top, grab the lip and escape. But the metaphorical tank I'm trying to create doesn't work like that. The builders of this tank meant for it to be a trap. So the more water you add the higher the walls go. There is no way to escape other than a small trap door at the bottom that can only be opened once the tank is completely dry.

The discouraging thing for me is knowing that unless the Lord intervenes somehow, I'll be in this water for more years to come than I imagined. I know we made progress paying down our debt last year, but we also added more water to our tank. I'm waiting for a few statements but am hoping the final numbers show we paid down more than we added in 2010. And if not, here's hoping for a huge suction machine to appear at my proverbial doorstep in the new year! :D