Someone to lean on

I don't know who it was that first came up with this thing about God being a crutch that people lean on - supposedly only those who are weak enough to need something/someone to lean on. When I was young I bought into this notion - I was still young enough to believe that only weak people need a crutch to lean on, and of course I was going to be strong forever...

Oh, how strong we felt back then, me and my friends, making fun of those who chose religion, those who, we felt, weren't up to facing life without relying on some deity that we believed was a totally made-up being anyway. We felt superior, more sophisticated, more advanced. We looked down on religious people as though they were still stuck in some lower phase of development and hadn't quite caught up with the rest of us.

At that time I didn't personally know anyone who knew God for real, anyone who had a relationship with this being. I knew about people saying prayers - reading out (often mumbling quickly) prayers from a book because those were the prayers you were supposed to say at that particular time/in that situation. But I had no idea that there were people out there who could talk to him freely, not to mention hearing him talk to them, feeling his presence, knowing he is there with them personally. I don't think I heard about that till after I started going to church, which was in my late twenties.

By that stage I had already learned that I am not invincible. I had come face to face with my vulnerability. That's part of why, when I finally met God personally (to my huge surprise, as I had no idea this was possible), I was at least partly ready to start letting go, to accept my need for someone to lean on, to allow God to offer me his arm.

I didn't learn it all in one go. I still continued to use other crutches from time to time - there were phases when I was using them more, phases when I was allowing crutches to destroy me more. What do I mean? I mean, for example, that stage in my early 30s when I was feeling extremely insecure after coming out of a long-term relationship - even though it was a very unhealthy one and it was good that I came out of it, I was very vulnerable immediately afterwards. Instead of turning to God for comfort, I turned to two things: men, who would for some brief moments make me feel valued (valued for the wrong reasons, but hey, when you're desperate you take whatever crumbs people throw you); and alcohol - which numbed the pain, and also made it easier to believe the rubbish those men said.

So I know about using crutches - I've done it. At that particular stage, gin and tonics were a crutch for me. But that sort of crutch costs... The price I paid came in various forms: half my weekend was wasted on being hungover (after seven G&Ts on a Friday night, we're talking major hangover); I did stuff that in the light of day I felt ashamed of (which doesn't, in the long run, help restore one's battered self-esteem); I lost not just self-respect but also respect from my work colleagues; and there was the trauma of an abortion following a drunken one-night stand with a colleague. They don't tell you all that at the pub when you ask for a double, they just tell you the price in pounds and pence.

Not all crutches are as destructive as a seven-gin-and-tonics habit. Some are not destructive at all in themselves - people use all sorts of things to numb the pain of life, sometimes positive things, like doing good for others for example. Keeping busy is one way people try to avoid facing the stuff they don't feel up to facing, and you can keep yourself busy with charitable work, with church activities, with looking after family - things that in themselves may be positive, constructive. But if we're using them in order to hide from the pain, then they are just crutches. These kind of crutches don't cost in the way that my alcohol habit cost me - the price is more subtle... the price is that you miss out on getting your pain dealt with. A bit like if you had the beginnings of cancer and someone gave you a fantastic new painkiller that doesn't have any side effects - it doesn't make you drowsy, you can keep taking it as often as you need, there's no harm in it - so you'd keep taking this painkiller and avoid going to the doctor to have treatment for your cancer.

That's what we humans do a lot of the time with our emotional pain. We pop painkillers - in the shape of alcohol, chocolate, keeping busy, drugs, exercise, sex, meditation, television, computer games, whatever - anything that will numb the pain or help us ignore it. Because the truth is we are all weak and vulnerable and we do need a crutch to lean on.

There is only one crutch that is really totally good for us, totally non-destructive. God is there for us to lean on, he is there to listen, to hear us crying or howling or yelling or whatever we need to get things off our chest. Any time, any place - it's not like you have to make an appointment, go somewhere special, catch him when he's not busy with something else... Always there. Totally dependable. 100% rock solid, reliable, trustworthy - he won't run off and blab your secrets to someone else. And he cares about us more than anyone else ever has and ever will.

Why is it that even though I already know him, I still forget this sometimes, I still catch myself now and again turning to something else other than him? Is it my pride, my desire to cope on my own, without admitting my need for a crutch? Like a child refusing his mother's help, insisting "I can do this myself" - and of course it's healthy to try doing things for ourselves, but when we fall over and scrape our knees, the sensible thing to do is go back to our loving parent and let them attend to the healing. Too often I don't, too often I ignore the scraped knee and carry on as though it never happened - why? it's a stupid tendency I have, to ignore problems, ignore pain in the hope it will just go away. But once in a while I do the sensible thing and turn to God and say: look, daddy, it hurts! This happened only yesterday, when a message I had from someone online upset me, and instead of ignoring it and soldiering on I allowed myself to pause and cry to my daddy. I felt so much better after that - so much better than bottling it up as we so often do.

If you have a good friend or parent or family member who is good at listening to you when you're hurting, then you've already had a small taste of what it's like, you've already experienced what it's like to offload your feelings to someone who cares and understands. God is like that and more so - friends and family all have their limits, they will have their off-moments when they've got too much on their mind or they're just tired or something and not up to listening properly, they'll have certain issues that they just don't understand, there'll be certain subjects that you don't feel you can burden them with, etc etc. With my dad I know there is absolutely nothing that he can't understand, there are no moments that are less convenient for him, there isn't any subject he is incapable of dealing with... and nothing I say is going to shock him, because he knows it all anyway.

And more than that - what he reminded me yesterday when I cried about that online message which I'd found hurtful - he knows what it's like to suffer. All the painful stuff I go through - it's all familiar territory to him. Whether it's physical pain, humiliation, rejection - whatever it is, Jesus has been through it and is alive to tell the tale! He has not only gone through extreme, unbelievable torture and suffering, he has gone through death and he survived it. Yes, I need a crutch - and I'd much rather lean on a strong one like that!!!

My Lord, my God, you are my refuge and my strength, the rock on which I stand, the crutch on which I can lean and carry on walking.