The "Crutch" of Christ

Copyright 2006 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

I once had someone in my family tell me that my faith was "a crutch". He expressed a common belief among many who have not personally embraced Jesus as Lord and Savior. Often it is spoken by those successful in the world’s eyes. They propose the idea that Christians are somehow weak because we have come to believe that true life, both eternal and temporal, absolutely depends on a saving relationship with our Creator. But these individuals decide that Christian faith is a crutch because they live under the illusion of self-sufficiency. It often does not occur to them that they themselves have crutches of other kinds.

No one is truly autonomous but most denizens of the 21^st Century West have bought into that most original satanic deception, that we are gods onto ourselves. We think we are independent. The ethic of Western, especially American, individualism has enshrined this idea as a personal ideal. The Horatio Alger story of the "Self-Made Man", someone who climbs to the heights of wealth and power from a low position through sheer force of character, is one of our favorite legends. In fact the word "legend" is a good choice for this belief because it does not reflect the ultimate reality of the human condition.

The truth is that every human being depends on something outside him or herself for strength. If that something isn’t God it most commonly is another person or persons. One man I know, for instance, always had a woman, be it his mother or later his wives, whom he unconsciously depended on to take care of him. He was one of those "Self-Made Men" in the eyes of many who admired him and he had indeed ascended from poverty to wealth, seemingly by pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. What those admirers did not know was that throughout his life he had an almost pathological aversion to being alone and the women he always had in his life were his crutches. I knew another person who presumed to look down upon what he perceived as the frailty of those who rely on God for help. But all who knew him intimately were aware that he looked to his family, particularly his parents, for stability and solace. They also knew that this dependence was unhealthy for a grown man and a destructive force in his adult relationships.

Sometimes the crutch is a thing. That thing can range from alcohol to inherited wealth to sexual gratification. What all these have in common is an ability to masquerade as something transcendent and ultimate, something on which we can rely for life and meaning. Such a masquerade may endure for a short time or for many years but eventually, and usually tragically, the masquerade comes to an end and we find out that what we have unconsciously depended on to sustain us has only hurt us.

The ultimate question is not one of some needing a crutch and some not. Simple common sense tells us that we are dependent creatures. We must depend on something other than ourselves for every breath we take and for much more than that. The question is rather who or what the crutch we are depending on is. Many, perhaps most, converts to Christ came to God because a personal crisis stripped us of the illusion of self-sufficiency or the sufficiency of any other earthly thing to give us life. The crisis simply opened our eyes to what was true all along but which we could not or would not see, our absolute need for the Source of all true life. At that point, by His grace, He made Himself known to us and we gave up all our false sources for the only real one.

To my relative I can only say that, yes, my "crutch" is Jesus Christ and blessed be His name.