I remember what it was like to feel permanent like a stone, to think myself marble and roll through the world dreaming and fearless. When you’re young, you may think that you might be the one person who lives forever. You know it’s ridiculous. But you’re happy to stand on that belief with both feet. After all, what could ever stop you?
But then hard things chip away at you—the flint of lost love, the granite of grief, the rock-rubbing river of anxiety, wiping away layer after layer of security. Eventually, the marble man is a memory. The brittle gives up the ghost of brawn. You sense the painful dawn of dependence and feel its harsh light on your skin . . . everywhere. It’s hard not to squirm and turn away when you’ve always been tugged toward the cool shadow of independence.
For me, the dawn of dependence broke when I watched my father die of cancer in our living room. It was a long time coming—an eleven-year brain tumor and three major surgeries. But I was eighteen, set on my stone self. I didn’t see it. I didn’t want to see it. But when death beckons the name of one you love, you are forced to stare. And weep. The world is not what you dreamed it to be. You thought you’d be Moses when trouble came. You’d part the waters and celebrate exodus. But no. Death will make you feel more like one of the riders crushed in the current. And when your head emerges from the water, you see plainly that you are small and carried, not great and conquering. You are dependent—as finite and fleeting as the white water that hissed into silence while Moses looked back. Raging against dependence is futile. In more ways than we can count, we lean on God as an ever-present guidepost. Everyone does. No rebellion is ultimately successful.
But that doesn’t keep us from trying, from refusing to ask for help, from attempting to stand upright. We prop ourselves up on people, passions, and potencies—anything that might give us the illusion of independence. That was the path I picked when my father died. Two years later, after trying to lean on anything other than faith for support, an anxiety disorder flipped me on my back and knocked the wind from my lungs. That was when I learned, once and for all, how deep dependence goes. My brain fractured like an old window. I forgot how to breathe, how to eat, how to function. Everything took effort. The light of my life diminished, like a candle flame reduced to quiet blue. A counselor later told me that I likely had a PTSD response to watching my father die in front of me. In a matter of seconds, I went from a man of marble to a man of dust. I saw with painful clarity how much I depended on others, how much I depended on the supporting palms of God beneath my mind and body, holding me up, keeping me sane. When a single circuit of your respiratory system feels like work, then you see how every breath is a miracle, every movement a measure of grace, every sound a symphony. God is always conducting.
That season of life was a crucible. I lost friends. I lost courage. I lost weight. And yet for all the anguish I’ve experienced in the twenty years since my first panic attack, I would never trade the anxiety for ease of mind. It has been far too cutting in healing ways. Anxiety has been a scalpel in the hands of a sovereign surgeon, slicing away the fat from a spirit riddled by hedonism and left in neglect. I needed trimming. And that trimming revealed two things: Hope is worth more than what you pay for it, and dependence is a divine gift.
Hope and Dependence
I’ve heard it said that real hope is painful, because hoping means risking disappointment—even despair. That’s why we sometimes avoid hope. But avoiding hope is a perilous move. It leaves us hollow and heartless. Without hope, we become obsessed with ourselves in the here and now. Our souls grow heavy and sink in the slough of self-fulfillment. And while hope may risk disappointment and despair, it promises much more: a home beyond all hurt, the home that lies at the end of our asking for help.
Throughout our lives, we grasp at that home. It feels at times like we’re running our fingers through smoke. But something real is there, just ahead of our touch. And we begin to desire it fiercely. Nothing else fully satisfies us. As C.S. Lewis put it, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” The only logical explanation is that we are made to hope for home. Buried beneath our brokenness, hope refuses to vacate the heart.
But hearts are teeming places. Other cares and desires build burrows. We feel smothered; it’s too crowded in the cardia. We need carving and egress. I read a poet who said that our sorrow is cavernous to joy. But it’s equally true that our suffering is cavernous to hope. The more we lose, the more we gain.
As suffering carves out space for hope and loosens lesser desires, our obsession with self melts away. That illusion that we were stone grows more and more ridiculous. Stones have no hands. How could they possibly reach out for the help of hope? Once dependence dawns on us and space is carved out inside us for that ancient home, we find joy in leaning. Resting on the God of grace shifts from an embarrassing need to a proud comfort. “Yes,” we say. “We are the learners. We are joyfully dependent. Though we may be dust, God gathers us. And there is power in union.”
Hope clears away the brush of egoism so that we see straight to the truth that dependence is a divine gift, not a burden of brokenness. We are a league of leaners walking homeward. We rest on the Redwood strength of God. We rely on His constant speech to liven our limbs and fill our lungs. We cast ourselves on Him because He cares for us in ten thousand ways (1 Peter 5:7). And our leaning spreads. We lean on father, mother, brother, sister, child, friend, acquaintance, stranger. We see the threads of interdependence everywhere.
And that is why autonomy—the will to self-governance and the illusion of independence—is such an evil. It is the quiet poison always pushing us away from dependence, and thus away from hope and home.
The Quiet Poison
Standing on the summit of learned dependence through anxiety and suffering, I see more clearly the heart of evil: the quiet sickness that leads to death. After all, what’s dark and deadly isn’t always loud. It’s whispers that work wicked, that fracture trust and turn treasures to dust. Even at our beginning, Satan knew it was quiet questions that kill. He didn’t shout, “Death to God!” He asked, “Did God actually say?” (Gen. 3:1). The question flew and the fall followed.
But how? How did a challenge to divine speech cause such chaos? The short answer is that it separated what God had joined together by convincing us that we don’t need joining—not to God and not to each other. The devil’s question dressed up dependence as a pauper and trust as a tyrant. Where God had spoken a world of interdependence for loving kings and queens, Satan whispered one of independence for would-be gods and goddesses. And for some reason, we picked Satan’s world. And we keep picking it.
Theologians call this rejection of dependence and trust autonomy, the will to govern ourselves. It’s the “I’m fine on my own” spirit, the couplet of those captive to self.
I’m fine on my own—no divine assistance.
Heart set like a stone, hardened in resistance.
It seems like such a little thing: a light breeze of an idea. What harm could independence really bring? Why can we not strive to be stones, set and secure on our own? How could a desire to be self-sufficient become caustic? That is a door of mystery we may never open.
And yet autonomy is ear-marked by many theologians as the evil at the essence of humanity—the rot in our heartwood. One theologian wrote, “The spirit of autonomy underlies every sinful decision of every human being.”1 Another claimed, “human wholeness cannot be recaptured unless every vestige of autonomy is abandoned in submission to the triune God of the Bible.”2 Bold words. Apparently, autonomy is no small threat. It is a deadly thing to strive for stone. Though it’s silent and unseen, autonomy is the dark and deadly poison eating away at us on the inside. It is the cancer of those called to follow the divine voice. And if, as some have suggested, the bravest thing we can do is ask for help, then autonomy is what begs us not to.
Christ and the Spirit
What is God’s response to the quiet poison of autonomy, to our constant rejection of dependence and trust? Think of this . . . just think of it: God’s response to our stubborn will to self-govern is to give Himself for us. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Autonomy is all about taking, striving to use whatever means we have to be the gods and goddesses we can never be. God answers autonomy by self-giving. That is the antidote, and only God can give it.
Would you like to see the antidote at work? Read the Gospels. The incarnate, self-giving Lord brings everyone back to their God-dependence. But look especially at how the antidote works in Luke 4, where the Son of God faces off against the agent of autonomy, the poison maker, Satan himself. Three times, Satan asks Jesus to be independent. Three times Jesus chooses to lean on the words of His Father. Leaning on God is always a matter of leaning on His words, for He is the God who speaks. Adam and Eve were meant to lean on His words, and the patriarchs, and the kings, and the Son, and the Apostles, and you, and me. Since the beginning, we have been called to lean ourselves on the voicings of God.
The Spirit as Helper
And even that is not on our shoulders. If the bravest thing we can do is ask for help, it’s a good thing God gave us a Helper (John 14–15). What will this Helper do? He will bring back the voicings. The Spirit will “bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). And when we remember the words, then we can lean on them.
The quiet poison of independence is going to keep calling out to us. It is going to tell us not to ask for help, not to lean, not to rest on the promises of God. And every moment that happens is a microcosm of world history. To listen and lean, or to stand alone—that is the question. I pray that my asking for help will burn up the quiet poison of independence. I thank God that anxiety has turned my ankles so that I might be known by my limping and leaning. I am not a man of stone. I am a son of self-giving. And I know my greatest hope lies in my greatest dependence.
- John M. Frame, Doctrine of the Word of God: A Theology of Lordship (P&R, 2010), 15.
- Richard B. Gaffin Jr., Word & Spirit: Selected Writings in Biblical and Systematic Theology, ed. David B. Garner and Guy Prentiss Waters (Westminster Seminary Press, 2023), 491.