Independence is the ultimate gift

I know a family who considers helping people a Christian trait they are proud of, but what they really do is enable people

They do it with the best of intentions, but the truth of the matter is that what they do makes them feel better than the people they supposedly help.

The old adage that if you give a man a fish he eats for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime applies to everything in life.

If you wait on someone hand and foot, encourage them to ask you for help with anything and everything, you are turning them into eternally needy people.

I have always believed that the best gift we can give anyone is to teach them to think, to solve problems, to figure out how to do what they think they cannot do.

It is usually easier to just do it yourself, but that is truly unkind. There will come a time when you are not there to do for them and what will they do then? 

Teaching someone to be self sufficient is not abandoning them. It is a careful way of nurturing that encourages self sufficiency, increases self worth, makes people feel stronger and therefore more confident and content.

But if someone has spent a lifetime enabling or being enabled that can be tough. It requires real love to put up with the tantrums, the self pity and the destructive actions of people who don't want to learn or grow. Whether it is out of laziness, or fear, or some disability, relying on other people to get through life does not feel good, because there is always the niggling knowledge that this help may not always be there.

Being an enabler doesn't make people love you. In the end it is just the opposite. It teaches them to use you and not respect you.

Teaching people how to solve their own problems is a much better way of showing love. It requires patience, repetition, and intelligent redirection. It is laying a path through the forest, not carrying someone on your back.