on crutches

As I am presently on crutches due to a fairly recent knee surgery, I thought I would share my thoughts on crutches...

I recall sitting in several conversations at coffee shops or pubs in Portland Oregon's Hawthorne District and being told that Christianity was "just a crutch for weak people". This usually came near the close of the conversation, and (I think) was intended to both insult me and end communications. At the time it usually frustrated me and left me a bit speechless, thus accomplishing the speakers intended goal.

I have since realized that the reason this was difficult to respond to was b/c it is true. Christianity is a crutch. Although, I would take it even further, I would say Christianity is more like a heart-lung machine or dialysis; absolutely vital to survival!

The underlying assumption which produces the statement that Christianity is a crutch (and means it as an insult), is an assumption of the innate goodness of man rather than the Biblical picture of man as a broken, sinful and needy. Jesus emphasizes this point when he says that it is not the healthy who need a physician but the sick.

I can not walk right now without my crutches, I need them. I would be a fool to act as if they were unimportant, to not recognize my present state of brokenness and try to limp or hop around or simply sit in the same place and atrophy.

I know that this thought has been expressed elsewhere by men who likely articulated it more clearly than I have here, but I have found over and over again that the experience of something deepens the meaning for me (i.e. feeling as if I was finally beginning to understand God's love for me as his child, when I first held my own firstborn son...) so if hobbling around for a few weeks will help me feel the depth of my spiritual brokenness a bit more accurately and acutely, then I suppose I should quit despising them and embrace them as a means of grace...