on feeding tubes and incubators

When my second son was born, just a few weeks ago, he had a few complications and so the doctors sent him to the NCU for a few days of close observation. During that time, he wasn’t eating enough from a bottle so the doctors inserted a feeding tube down his little throat to make sure he was getting enough nutrients. They kept him in one of those little plexiglass incubator boxes that regulates the temperature and had him attached to various machines in order to monitor his vitals.

This was all emotionally taxing to see, but the hardest thing was watching him using the feeding tube. It felt very unnatural. He wasn’t supposed to be able to exist on his own in this little box, he was supposed to come home with us and need us to care for him and need my wife to feed him. This other thing just wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. This felt like artificial independence to me.

I think about that when I hear people talking about being independent Christians. Churches have started using the phrase ‘self-feeders’ when they talk about the goals of their discipleship program. The idea is that Christians should be totally independent people, completely capable of existing on their own...spiritually speaking.

(Now I will admit that far too many people feel like they cannot survive unless they have a pastor teaching them. They simply don’t believe they can understand Scripture unless someone who has a fancy degree tells them what it means. I understand why pastors and church leaders would want to wean people away from cognitive dump spiritual growth and toward a dynamic personal life with God. There are many benefits to training people to think, study and pray for themselves.)

But I have begun to wonder if we have missed something significant along the way to becoming self-feeding Christians. I’m wondering if we have come to think that Christian maturity is synonymous with Christian independence. The most mature Christians will be the ones who do not need anyone else to maintain spiritual vitality. To put it another way, to depend on someone else is to demonstrate a lack of maturity in faith.

I’ve come to see this as artificial independence. It’s kind of like we champion the idea that the strongest in our communities are the ones who are solidly encased in a plexiglass incubator with feeding tubes down their throats. So we all strive for that. We want to be satiated and comfortable within the confines of our meticulously controlled spiritual eco-system. We do not need anyone to feed us, we are capable of feeding ourselves. No wonder people think they don’t need to be a part of the family of God... they really don’t.

This is where we have missed something. We have missed the fact that we aren’t supposed to be able to exist on our own. We are supposed to genuinely need each other. What if we extracted the feeding tubes from our throats and stepped out of our climate controlled incubators? What if my spiritual journey was less about ensuring that I am fed and focused more on feeding my sisters and brothers? What if I stopped asking, ‘What’s in it for me?’ and began to ask, ‘What’s in me for you?’

Two things would happen I think.

1. We would learn what it means to be generous.

Asking a different question might lead us down new roads and help us explore what a real generosity of life looks like. It means that we would learn to orient our lives around giving grace, showing mercy, extending forgiveness, pursuing shalom, and helping others flourish. This would be a way to practice giving up my life for the sake of the ones in my community. Imagine what kind of communities we would have if we came into them practicing that kind of generosity.

2. We would learn what it means to trust.

As you may have been thinking all along, if I take out the feeding tube and start feeding others, won’t I starve? Well, not necessarily. However, instead of being artificially independent, you will have to trust the sisters and brothers who gather around you in community. You will have to entrust your spiritual vitality to them and God’s Spirit working through them. That may be hard to do, but real community will never be easy.

(I’m not saying that we don’t practice spiritual disciplines or pursue personal spiritual formation. What I’m saying is that we miss something if we view personal spiritual transformation as the only end of our spiritual journey, and that we might be surprised how much God shapes us as we give our lives to our communities.)

Learning to entrust ourselves to the community of God is one way we learn that real faith is about cultivating dependence, just like my son is living a more human existence because he is dependent on us for everything. As my son grows he will need different kinds of support from us, he will always need us, just in different ways. As much as society may tell us the goal of life is independence, it seems to me that the goal of the life of faith is to realize what real dependence looks like. Human independence doesn’t seem to be all that human to me. We flourish when we are connected to one another, because its not good for us to be alone...