June 2023 – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

June 29, 2023June 28, 2023

Choice Pattern

It is God who is at work in you, causing you to want to do his will and enabling you to do his will* (paraphrase)

Young Benjamin Solomon Carson heard his mother’s admonitions often. Choosing to heed her counsel, Ben took up the practice of reading, of intentional study. He figured out that most anyone could do at least this much. He chose to apply himself. His mother, Sonya Carson – a praying woman, a single mom – anchored her life and security in God. She invoked his blessing over her two young sons as she labored at multiple jobs through their growing-up years.

“She never made excuses”, retired Neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson recalls, “and she never accepted an excuse from us.

“If we ever came up with an excuse, she always said, ‘Do you have a brain?’ And if the answer was yes, then she said, “Then you could have thought your way out of it.”

The pathway to flourishing in Christ is not a venture in teeth-gritting self-help. Yet, each of Jesus’ disciples does invest his or her own measure of effort into the enterprise. They have skin in the game as did Sonya Carson in the raising of her children.

Jesus did not stir passion among his audiences by churning out motivational slogans. What did he offer that sparked in his followers the passion and the resolve for living well?

By his own purposeful, routine actions he supplied them with a pattern. Today, as then, Jesus’ own day-by-day personal practices serve as a kind of template for entering into and living from “the good life”.

In his humble reliance upon God the Father, Christ modeled for his followers the best kind of living available to humans everywhere. Such living comes through embracing and routinely nurturing common habits that were practiced by Jesus. So that we his disciples may enter the un-anxious rhythms of our Lord’s own whole and beautiful life.

“For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure”*

June 22, 2023June 23, 2023

Rankings

Are habits of surrender reserved for the big leaguers alone – the Billy Grahams, the George Verwers, the Mother Teresas?

It seems to come naturally, doesn’t it, the tendency to think, “Yes, but that is them, not me. I am just me”. We’re prone to contrast what we see as our lackluster performance in growth against that of others whose stars seem to shine bright. Such dead-end thinking misses the point and holds us hostage to our insecurities.

Not a single Jesus-follower who has ever reflected him well has done so by the mere capital of talent or natural gifting.

Simply put, God does not know a big leaguer. He has never met one.

Yes, every person carries their own gifts and graces. Still, the one thing that sets the flourishing disciples (apprentices) apart is the simple willingness to believe in and love Jesus. It is from this garden soil of trust alone that undiluted obedience is born. And, from this, fruit. It is simple, really. The old hymn sums the matter up well, “Trust and obey. . . there is no other way”.

Young Billy was a common North Carolina country boy working dairy cattle when a farmer neighbor invited him to a gospel meeting in a nearby town. His heart was moved by things heard that evening. Billy came to be esteemed in years to come, America’s pastor.

The tough conditions of the poor in the Albania city where she lived stirred the mind of an adolescent girl, Gonxha Agnes, a.k.a. Teresa of Calcutta. Myriads of discarded human beings got to taste for their first-ever time unconditional care.

Captivated by lines from a book gifted him, a rascally kid from New Jersey hungered for more. In time, through his efforts and to his savior’s glory, a library-ship, the Logos, traversed oceans, docking at port cities across the world heralding liberating news.

We are certainly given a wonderful thing to ponder, musing over that handful of people the Christian world celebrates as singular standouts.

Still, for every celebrated hero of the faith the worldwide family of God today numbers millions. Humble, obedient disciples of Jesus, faithfully plodding in life and service in close company with their Lord. By human standards they might be labeled, little leaguers.

Jesus knows them as friends.

June 15, 2023June 14, 2023

George On My Mind

Peace lives on the street called Surrender.

When he shared of his Sarcoma cancer diagnosis, George offered up a request, “Please ask people not to pray for total healing as I really am looking forward to heaven.”

What moves a person to make such an appeal? What routine rhythms of living might bring a man or woman to approach their final months and days with such a mindset?

People who knew George Verwer well understand that these are reasonable questions. And that their answers are within reach. Our attention gets captured when we witness a person displaying what seems complete inner calm when facing distressing news.

George had, through the years, related accounts of his mischief-making days as a youth growing up in New Jersey. He spoke, as well, of a neighbor woman who felt compassion for him in his waywardness and of her commitment in regularly praying for him. The neighbor’s teenage son gifted George a copy of a Bible text, the Gospel of John.

Not long afterward he found himself on a bus en route to Madison Square Garden where he would hear a young preacher offering sermons.

Responding to Billy Graham’s invitation to “turn your life over to the Lord Jesus”, young George came to faith. From there, he went on to proclaim Jesus’ good news of God’s kingdom. Today thousands of obedient Christ-followers staff a worldwide organization he founded, Operation Mobilization. Distributing the Bible and Christian literature became a fervent passion for George.

Among the first pieces of literature he read after his conversion was Billy Graham’s, “Peace With God”. In his ‘yes’ to the Lord as a 16-year-old, the youth had opened himself to God’s peace. Then, throughout his long and often-challenging lifetime, he gave himself over and over to routine surrenderings. Rhythms of practices. Spiritual disciplines.

George’s rhythms of living, all in the companionship of the Holy Spirit, marked him as a man of joyful contentment – a follower and lover of Jesus. Unafraid, even in death.

June 8, 2023June 9, 2023

In Process

Taking as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.

Wait a minute. . . he did that? I am to do that?

That Serenity Prayer line will rattle a person’s status quo underpinnings.

To take on life as it really is we must deal with resistance toward and engagement with the stink of the journey.

In what universe do you find a lame man with a limp openly bearing witness to his “beautiful feet on the mountains bearing good news”*? Can beauty flower and flourish in the middle of contrary forms? Are not all bad things. . . well. . . bad?

The religious tradition I was fostered in generally prescribed an unwritten list of responses to adversity whenever it came calling. Resist – Rebuke – Refuse.

Pain does not bring good to a person’s life. Resist it.

Adversity is not a pathway to human betterment. Rebuke it.

God is not one to bring his children into places of suffering. Refuse it.

In some communities, too, a notion prevails that anything of a non-religious nature is to be avoided – certainly not enjoyed. In my old age I’m drawn to jazz music, gentle instrumentals. Taking in cool smooth blends of light piano, an old upright bass and soft guitar or sax brings a kind of therapeutic effect. I digress.

Jesus took the world as he found it. He resisted straightening out all the bad stuff during his years walking the earth. He did not tackle in a quick moment all the long string of horrors, did not rid the world of them. Not then and not now. The unspeakable pain brought on from evil did not cease upon his entry to the world. He came to the world as it was and lived in it, even ministered in it – where it was, the way he found it – not the way he would have wished it to be.

It seems that God (being all-knowing and wise) opts to allow many of man’s choices – destructive as they often are – to play out unblocked on history’s stage. For now, anyway. If righteous Jesus can exercise self-control enough to hold off righting the world’s wrongs by a sweep of his hand, is he not able to supply his disciples grace and patience to live and serve in the midst of the same?

The fact that we are not charged with remedying the world of all its ills comes as a freeing thing to the soul. While we are to steward the roles we are assigned in bringing about change, we understand that straightening the dysfunctions of our own selves calls for plenty attention all its own.

June 1, 2023

Element of Peace

The left footprint on display in the fresh-turned soil bore no resemblance to its counterpart. My right foot featured a really high arch while the left one lacked an arch at all. This one’s imprint carried the appearance of a flat board.

Thus, my bare feet had left a trail of odd alternating marks as I leapt to keep pace with my daddy’s longer strides across the plowed furrows.

Yes, the hardship of poliomyelitis from a prior time had left permanent marks. Yet, here I was curiously limping. . . and frolicking.

We don’t find people who are prone to relish suffering. I would certainly not be counted among them. Words like hardship or adversity or pain stir in many of us a cringe of resistance and angst.

Still, visiting the Bible’s pages we routinely find triumph mingled with trial. Pleasure and pain show up as near neighbors. Happiness keeping company with hardship.

We muse over these strangely-matched companions. Especially so in reflective seasons like Holy Week, the period of Jesus’ (and history’s) darkest hours leading to his awful crucifixion.

How perplexing seems the phrase of the New Testament writer, “looking to Jesus who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross*

Enduring flogging and a torturous public execution with its attending shame, Christ’s suffering comes to us as ‘hardship’ utterly redefined.

So, we revisit our prayer – “accepting hardship as a pathway to peace”.

The apprentice of Jesus comes to actually affirm the beauty of suffering when endured in a grace lavishly supplied. Holding the master’s image in view the disciple settles into an element of peace words fail to capture. The difference is found through the example and presence of the resurrected, sacrificial coach.

Christ’s disciples make up that unusual sampling of humans who reconcile the paradox – hardship, an indispensable part of the good life.

He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace*