It’s time to toughen up, Buttercup

Let’s face it, you are soft. You are soft, I am soft and everyone around us is as well — and it shows.

Of all the peoples of the world, Americans in general are soft because of the material wealth they have grown up in. Even the poorest of our poor are far better off than most of the rest of the entire world’s population. While this hasn’t always been this way, the last one to two generations have had such increasing creature comforts that they now believe that they are entitled not only these comforts, but more. The Bible, too, makes this same correlation in the gospels of Matthew and Luke as Jesus speaks about his cousin John and says, “They which are gorgeously appareled, and live delicately, are in king’s courts.”  Quite obviously, the bulk of humanity used to live under very harsh circumstances, but Americans of today tend to whine when things get the least bit difficult.

This attitude flies in the face of nature itself. Consider this: When a baby is born, it is completely helpless, relying entirely upon its parents for its survival. Over the process of time that babe will grow and shed this helplessness and learn to do for itself. First it will learn to transport itself, learning to crawl and walk. Then it will learn to eat for itself, at least the food that is prepared for it. Then it will learn to control its bodily functions and so graduate out of the diaper phase. And on and on it will continue for some 18 years or so until it joins the ranks of adulthood, those who can care for themselves. And we consider this to be normal childhood development; it is a shedding of dependence into independence and self-reliance, and those who never make this transition are labeled “developmentally delayed.” 

I had an uncle who grew up this way. Though he was born as normal as the average baby, through a tragic accident, his development potential became severely limited, and he spent the remainder of his life from the age of about 2 on as an infant, totally dependent on others for his care. When I first saw him he was over 40 years old, and though he was in a man’s body, his mind was that of a babe less than a year old.

While I understand that there are those like my uncle who cannot help themselves, the idea of raising children so they remain dependent on others is totally foreign to me. Remember me?

I am the one with 11 children, and I don’t want them to be dependent on me for the rest of my life.

At some point, I want them to be on their own, not just for my sake, but for their own, because when I die, if they are still dependent on me, they will never make it. And I want them to survive my demise.

But this is exactly where the path of entitlements and universal health care lead. They haven’t really made people better, but softer and dependent on others. Call it fair, call it your right, call it whatever you want, but you cannot call it Christian.

The Bible preserves for us a hardy faith, a faith that makes the individual responsible for themselves. A faith that is willing to call a man an infidel and decree that he had denied the faith for failure to provide for his own. Do you understand what this means? The entitlement and universal health care culture is tantamount to rejection of Christianity; to allow others to take up your own responsibilities is to deny Christ.

The apostle Paul said it best, though, when he called such behavior disorderly. The sin of being disorderly is two-fold, and begins with a refusal to work. In effect, this now includes poor decisions that limits your job opportunities, like not taking advantage of education provided free of charge. And it includes eating the “bread” of others; that is, what someone else has labored for and you have not. The sin of disorderliness was so counter to what Christianity stood for that not only did Paul say “that if any would not work, neither should he eat,” but he also said to “withdraw yourselves from every brother who walketh disorderly.” In other words, break fellowship with them.

Christianity, folks, is not for sissies. If you don’t like what God says about earning your own keep it is because you’ve lost the spirit that carried our ancestors across the Atlantic, over the plains, and then north to The Last Frontier. A spirit that endured hardship without complaint.

Hard times require hard answers. It’s time to toughen up, Buttercup.

Ron Hamman is pastor of Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla. Contact him at 357-4229 or rghamman@mtaonline.net.