During my freshman year of high school, I got a scar on my right hand. It’s a line about an inch long about down the middle of my hand, starting near my wrist and going towards my fingers.
I remember when I got it that I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t go wash it or get a Band-Aid or anything. Typical guy thing, not needing help.
But that’s something I pondered this morning. What is it about guys – or more specifically, me – that causes us to avoid help or healing sometimes?
I think this can be a human problem more than just a guy problem. For some of us, seeking help or allowing someone else to help us is the last thing we want to do. Often it’s called “self-sufficiency.” It’s relying on yourself alone to get through life, to get what you have to get, to know what you need to know, to fix yourself.
There’s some self-sufficiency which is good. If you’re constantly reliant on others, you will, in all likelihood, end up alone anyway. There are certain cases where illnesses force that to be the case, and there’s nothing you can do. But if you spend your entire life totally reliant on others, you’ll get nowhere.
A Christian is not made for self-sufficiency. A human is not made for self-sufficiency. We’re made to need other people. Most importantly, we’re made to need God.
See, we all have scars. We all have weaknesses, injuries, flaws. And if we spend our whole lives trying to fix them ourselves, we’ll never get fully healed. Sure, we might fix one or two on our own. But we need to be willing to let others, and God, in to help with the healing process, and in some cases bring full healing.
This is one of the things I’m learning right now with my fiancée. She’s the sweetest, and it seems she wants nothing more than to simply care for me, do whatever she can for me. As someone who’s self-sufficient most of the time, I have to learn to let her do what she does best: help people.
Self-sufficiency will get us nowhere in the long run. True humility is learning to let someone help us, learning to let go of our pride and accept help in the healing process of those scars.
And then there’s our need for salvation. We can’t do it on our own. We need God to intervene for our eternal state to be secured.
In a self-sufficient world, where it often becomes about “what I can do” and improving our own skills and making a name for ourselves, we need help. We need others to come alongside us and help us through. We need Jesus for life now and life afterwards.
Those scars often don’t take care of themselves. They stay there. They stick.
So don’t be afraid to seek help.
By A Ransomed Soul 