Month: February 2018

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Summit Destiny

While the dance idea may suit some believers as they launch into a transforming life in Jesus, the metaphor likely won’t attract others. A mountain-climbing expedition may. The apprenticing pilgrim takes on a rigorous life if he is seriously chasing the call of Jesus: Follow me.

More rigorous than a climber striking out for, say, Africa’s highest mountain peak. Our family lived and served among the Chaga people in the foothills of the majestic mammoth.

School break had set in for our two oldest. “Shall we give Kili a try?”

What parent adopts a fairy-tale voice and launches into a children’s story (the Little Red Choo-choo Train) for a teenaged son or daughter? In a public setting, no less.

Maybe it can inspire them to go the full distance (Kilimanjaro’s 19,000-foot summit) once we set out from this base camp. As the fairy-tale unfolded, fourteen-year-old Scott lazered his attention to a hiking boot as if the world’s survival depended on his rightly adjusting a small stone beneath it. Anything to distance his association with the backpack-laden man prattling on with “I think I can, I think I can. . .” Julie, two years his senior, simply rolled her eyes.

The truth was, we were in for the most daunting test of our stamina and will we had ever faced.

Hiking miles upward to Africa’s loftiest point, with its scarce oxygen and precarious steeps, calls for all the reserves a climber can summons. Reaching Kili’s snowy rim demands three things. Vision, intention and means. 

A brilliant and beloved U.S.C. professor and gospel minister, Dallas Willard, strung this trio of nouns – Vision, Intention, Means – together when coaching Christ-followers toward best practices in their quest to become like Jesus. Willard often used the word apprentice when speaking of a disciple.

“An apprentice of Jesus is learning from him how to lead their life as he would lead their life if he were they.”

My own long and incompleted walk towards transformation into Christlikeness – winding trails (often upward, at other times plateaued, even descending) – stirs added memories from the 1989 Kilimanjaro venture. Our little trio in the company of our guide.

The climb would have met with failure but for our guide.

©2018 Jerry Lout

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Blessing Waves

The mid-twentieth-century tsunami sweeping inland from the coastal town of Mombasa carried with it no carnage, no loss of lives. . . no water. What the wave of spiritual awakening brought was a transformed culture among Kenyans, Ugandans and Tanzanians for years to come.

“Only the power of the living Christ proclaimed in demonstration of the Holy Spirit can meet the urgent needs of humanity.”

Oklahoma-born evangelist T. L. Osborn, who is credited with the quote, launched his gospel crusade in in Kenya’s second largest city on the shores of the Indian Ocean. It was 1957.

The message of Christ was preached. Prayers for healing followed. Africans yielded to Jesus by the thousands, many of them gaining freedom from sicknesses, others from addictions and destructive lifestyles. They had met Jesus.

Once the meetings ended, the message of Christ swept inland via large numbers of newly-transformed, love-emboldened men and women.

According to one African churchman the Mombasa meetings released the fountain of a river spreading through the heart of East Africa. Hundreds of new believers were launched overnight as gospel preachers in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Congo shared the message. Most did so with little or no funding, scant organizational backing. Within a few years, thousands of new churches had sprung up in bustling cities and sleepy villages. Led by men lacking somewhat in biblical literacy but not in passion.

It was into this eruption of multiplying churches the generation of missionaries preceding ours had landed. And in their wake a company of wet-behind-the-ears, twenty-somethings with a measure of Bible knowledge and less practical experience than any of us would have boasted. Two or three Bible schools had been opened by now. But the demand for foundational instruction among hundreds and hundreds of untrained spiritual shepherds remained daunting. Still, we went to work, our hearts sincere. A faithful Lord –  keenly aware of our frailties – met us there.

From Lake Victoria’s Luo-land to the Ocean’s Mijikenda peoples, African preachers – their local-language Bibles in hand – shared good news. Courageously. Compassionately. Whole populations, formerly bound to witchcraft curses, incantations and the great dread of dying, came alive in the hope of the gospel.

Lyrics of a Swahili chorus gave testament to many, of their encounters with a vital Deity known as loving, forgiving, empowering. Moto imeshuka (Fire fell on me).

The wonder of Christ-centered outbreaks acknowledged as from the Holy Spirit wasn’t new to the continent. In the 1920s an African national, Simeon Nsibambi and a missionary, Joe Church, labored together in prayer as they searched Scripture and their own hearts. Both thirsted for holy and empowered living. Others joined the quest. By the coming decade, waves of sorrow over sin, confession and deliverance, and believing faith broke across Rwanda and Burundi territories, through Uganda and beyond.

Turning from their wrongs, inviting the Spirit’s infilling, vast sectors of tribal peoples – thousands of nominal Christians numbered among them, shed lifeless religions and paganism. In exchange for an emancipating redemption secured through a cross and a vacated grave.

While believers still far from perfect, grappled with issues, struggles and setbacks, Jesus undeniably marked their lives going forward. The movement grew. It’s transformative impact on religious sectors, educators and households of all descriptions flourished.

The movement bore fruit whose fragrance and flavor draw hungry seekers still. Eventually a name was assigned the phenomenon, The East Africa Revival.

Today Christ-followers from across the continent – male and female, seasoned laborers and young converts alike – press on with the proclamation of God’s love in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Africa’s enthusiastic heralders bring to mind a captivating phrase – the motto of a group of disciple-makers known as the Navigators.

To know Christ and to make Him known.

A more worthy, more glorious mission, who could conceive?

©2018 Jerry Lout

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Consulting The Guide

August, 1988. . .

Really? I couldn’t believe the signatures facing me from the entry roster. Him? Really?

“Hey guys, look over here. Guess who beat us up the mountain ten days ago. . . a president of the United States!” My two teens, their backpacks secured in place, sidled over.

Some twenty names, including family members, were all penned vividly in artful hand-written cursive, clearly by one person. . . a scribe representing the entourage, no doubt.

A further surprise came later in the day as I chatted up our guide.

“Joseph,” I asked, “I noticed back there that a United States President went up the mountain a few days ago.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

“That’s Interesting. Were you one of the porters or guides for the climb?”

“Yes, sir.

“Well – if I could ask – what was it like, that trip?”

“Ah”, Joseph smiled broadly. We had paused on the trail to take a swig from our canteens. “It was a very good trip”. The guide’s face brightened further. “Yes, a good trip, even though the president almost refused to succeed. He did reach there, though. Up to the mountain’s top.”

Joseph’s voice now took on a deepened tone of pride (well-placed, I afterward thought).

“You know, we carried him there.”

“Carried him? You carried the president?”

“Ah, yes. You see, once we reached to a quite high place he was very tired and lacking strength. He told the group to go on and continue. He said he would go back down the mountain for he could not continue on.” Joseph swiveled to gaze toward the summit, many kilometers far ahead and far higher.

“But we told him ‘no’. We Guides, we said to him he must reach to the top, he must get there. So two of us came to where he was. Together we lifted him. We carried him on to the top.”

Assuming the guide’s account was accurate, the past president – raised in the deep south and now well into his sixties – had found himself perched atop the roof of Africa. In good hands. Literally.

The image in my mind of mountain guides bearing their distinctive human cargo along Kilimanjaro’s steepest slopes called to mind a beloved piece of popular verse. Adorning the walls of gift shops from Disney World to Branson, Missouri – Footprints in the Sand.

My mind goes to the spiritual trek any sincere believer embarks on.

While it is true there are times we are unable to lift a trace of our own shoe leather in making headway on our march of faith, our call from him, our invitation is to walk. Not walk apart from him, to be sure. As Bob Sorge states it in The Secret of Walking With God, “God created man for the enjoyment of a walking relationship that involved companionship, dialogue, intimacy, joint decision-making, mutual delight, and shared dominion.”

And here is the rub. I am called to sonship in Christ, called to know him. Know him more and more, by walking with him.

So how? Just how does this happen in actual, realistic ways?

A visit with the one we call our guide, along with a few of his early spokesmen as their words reach to us from scripture, helped shed some light on the big question, How?

© 2018 Jerry Lout

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The Swarm

Wheeling the car onto the dusty grounds of Kehancha Clinic with my latest patient on board I took in a distressing sight. A little girl not yet two, crying pitifully as the mother on whose lap she sat, labored in vain to console her.

These and others made up a gathering line of ill and injured awaiting their turn to be seen. The group, most strangers to one another, sat on a shallow wooden bench butted against the clinic’s outside wall. Bare spots in the building’s whitewashed veneer marked areas where chunks of plaster had at some point released their hold.

My attention kept returning to the small child, her eyes clamped as if glued shut,  her face ballooned out, a tormented ball of puff.

I never learned the child’s fate, just the tale of what brought her to the clinic – a swarm of bees descending without warning from upper branches of a tree. Her older siblings, seconds earlier happily playing beneath the tree’s limbs, had fled in a panic, leaving the little one the bee’s lone target.

Killer Bees. A term suited to theatre marquees promoting the latest horror film. Some years after the distressing scene at the village clinic, a ferocious swarm nearly cost a friend of mine his life.

“Ray, what’s going on with the dogs. . . sounds like they’ve gone crazy.” The missionary couple moved to a window to see their two beloved German Shepherds taken in a wild frenzy, crying, barking. Without pausing, Ray rushed outside. Margaret watched as he raced across the big open farm yard. Then looked on in horror as she witnessed the stinging bees blanket her husband as well.

As Ray flailed at the dive-bombing attackers with one hand he worked frantically to free the dogs of their long running-leashes. “Come Princess!”

But the beautiful animal lay motionless, heavy against Ray’s hard tugging, already a casualty to the angry swarm.

The battle had only begun.

©2018 Jerry Lout

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Unrelenting

Ray was nonstop shouting as he rushed back in to the sanctuary of his house, “Marge, grab cushions, a pillow! Beat me. Knock the bees off me!” Ray was a tall man, athletic with a strong competitive streak. The Africa bees had attacked his six-foot, seven-inch frame with a frenzy exceeding his best moves against his fiercest opponent on the local Squash Court.

Slamming shut the front door behind her husband, Margaret pounded a pillow against him again and again. Buzzing attackers dropped to the floor while others clung to his arms, his neck and face. The Kenya climate called for dressing extra light during one’s leisure time at home. Ray wore cut-offs and scores of bees now darkened his bared legs. Still others moved about his hair and clothing.

Ray had been carrying a yelping bundle of fur when he raced through the doorway – their third canine, small and lovable. The missionary had snatched her up on his desperate rescue dash about the yard. Water had been drawn into a tub by Margaret and the insect-covered pup was thrown into it. Bees fell away and the poor, drenched animal – though crying, whimpering – seemed likely to have been saved.

With a strange wooziness now overtaking her husband, Margaret labored to get him past a second outer doorway and into their dusty-white Peugeot station wagon.

Ray sat half-slumped in the passenger seat as the car raced along the winding driveway and onto the Nakuru highway, anxious and prayerful Margaret at the wheel. They were ten kilometers from the nearest reliable clinic and, even with her gas pedal a bare inch off the floorboard, the racecourse speed of the station wagon felt slow-motion.

At last.

Gravel flew and the Peugeot halted amid a swirl of dust.

“We’re here, Ray.” Margaret had braked the car to a hard stop not far from the clinic’s entrance.

Ray was weakening with each passing second. Deadly toxins mingled in his bloodstream and Margaret knew he was fading. Laboring to escort him toward the clinic door, she whispered,

Jesus, let there be time. Please Jesus.

©2018 Jerry Lout