What are your crutches supporting?

Your average skeptic or atheist is likely to consider Christianity a 'crutch.' Because it's so nice to believe in a Savior and a God who takes care of you, those not man enough to face reality buy in to the dream (their reasoning goes), because they cannot live without it. One can easily answer this claim, of course. God has manifested Himself in incontrovertible ways, and by no means is facing up to your sin and then denying self a command for the fainthearted.

In a sense, of course, every belief system is a crutch. Atheists' disbelief in God is a crutch for their faith in science, their faith in their own reasoning, their supposedly courageous embrace of 'reality,' and their self-absorption. It is a crutch that provides their rationale for ignoring God's commands. Polytheism is a crutch constructed out of the desire to appease the natural world. Humans are crippled: that's the point. We can't make it on our own. So, rightly construed, it is not really inaccurate to call Christianity a crutch, because it recognizes a key truth that Christ, of course, knew. Humans cannot spiritually (or physically, for that matter) support themselves. We do not move and act in a vacuum, but rather in the context of our beliefs about core aspects of humanity and the world.

But enough clarification. If Christianity may be rightly understood as a crutch, that is, Christ bearing our burdens, in another sense Christianity can be a crutch in a disturbing and insidious way. A way that gives the atheists some room to point their fingers. It is one that many Christians, I fear (including this one) are guilty of to one degree or another, perhaps especially in the West. We can make Christianity a crutch to support our daily routines--to make ourselves feel good about our lives. We pray, read the Bible, attend church, take communion, and put fish on our bumpers, but when it comes to stretching beyond those activities, which in the United States are, except in a few rare circumstances, entirely without opposition of any kind, we balk.

Vibrant faith can be tough as nails. It can be as simple a difficulty as smiling at someone your flesh wants to hate, or as hard as raising an autistic son for twenty-five years, dealing in a Christ-like way with a beloved spouse's adultery, or staring down at a gun barrel and saying "Christ is my Lord." We don't have to be missionaries to Bengal to be good Christians. I don't feel a call to be a missionary. But if I were, for a moment, to let concern for the world's opinion influence the content of my essays or novels, or to keep my mouth shut when I should speak because I fear what men might think--then I have made a concession to the world. When someone else is hurting, when an issue needs defending, when a friend needs rebuking, when our testimony needs to be given, when our precious self needs denying, when ten children need to be raised, when a monotonous job requires twenty years of your uncomplaining labor, when a dream needs to be abandoned, when an addiction needs to be broken, faith says Go. The flesh says Wait, the flesh says It's too hard, the flesh says You'll be embarrassed, the flesh says You don't want to get involved just now, but since when are we supposed to listen to the flesh?

We must be careful that our faith isn't a little furry thing we keep under the table. We crippled humans, dead in sin, certainly need a crutch. But Christ did not die so that we might live comfortable lives. War is not comfortable. We are at war. A war almost literally as old as Adam. Whatever our place in it, whatever our duties, great or small, at home or abroad, let us look to Christ and be bold, vigilant, and undismayed.