Independence

Recently, my dad allowed us to get him a lift chair.  This is a much more momentous occasion than you may realize.  Dad is ninety-three and has needed a lift chair for years, but he has refused to allow us to get one for him.  Instead, Mom would have to help lift him out of his chair.  Since Dad weighs about two hundred pounds and Mom is maybe one twenty at most, this was not working very well.  I suspect Mom, who’s ninety, may have finally told Dad that, much as she would like to, she simply cannot continue to lift him out of his chair any more and that he had no alternative but to get a lift chair.

At any rate, we got him one a couple of weeks ago, and he’s using it.  I doubt if he’ll ever admit that he likes it, but I think he does.  He has to like the fact that he can get out of his chair by himself now.  He also is able to walk around the house much better than he could before.  Without the lift chair, he was expending a lot of energy just trying to stand up, and so Mom would have to help him walk to wherever he was going.  Now, with the lift chair, he can stand up easily, grab his walker, and go wherever he wants in the house without help.

I was thinking the other day about the irony involved in this.  One of the main reasons Dad resisted getting a lift chair was because he did not want to be dependent on one.  Dad’s a proud man, he cherishes his independence, and he did not want to concede any of it.  But the thing is that, without the lift chair, he was dependent on Mom for getting up and moving around.  Now, with the lift chair, he can get up and move around by himself.  In other words, his desire to be “independent” got in his way and caused him to be more dependent.  Once he gave up some of what he thought was his independence, he became more independent than he had been before.

It strikes me that faith can be like that.  You and I are often reluctant to truly depend on God.  We want to do things by ourselves.  We have our pride, we cherish our independence, and we don’t want to concede any of it.  But in fact, what we see as our “independence” gets in our way.  It causes us to be more dependent—on money, on possessions, on impressing others, etc.  And it causes us to worry about all those things and others besides.

But when we give up what we think of as our independence and depend on God, we actually become more independent.  We no longer worry about whether we have enough possessions or whether we’re impressing others or anything like that.  We’re freed from all our worries.  We know that God is there, that God will help us, and that things will go the way they’re supposed to go.  Things may not always go the way we’d have chosen them to, but whether they do or not, we know God will see us through.  Our desire for “independence” gets in our way.  When we give up some of that independence and depend on God, we let go of those worries and can live the way God wants us to live.

Pride and a desire for independence are good things, up to a point.  But beyond that point, they get in our way.  And that’s especially true when it comes to faith.  We should never desire to be independent of God, and we should never be too proud to turn to God.  God wants to help us.  All we need to do is let God do that.