Category: Jerry’s Reflections

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Mind The Step

Growing in Christlikeness takes brains.

Not brilliance. Not genius. The Christian Faith isn’t privately reserved for Nobel Prize recipients in science and medicine. Indeed, any trusting, open-hearted child may drink deep of the waters of salvation.

But serious Jesus-followers setting out to grow as his disciples are not ones to check their brains at the door. To them, good sense reflected by sound thinking is essential – a no-brainer, you might say.

Unfolding the topography map (Google Earth wouldn’t debut for another decade) I was soon taken by the stunning landscape spread out before me. Even when merely displayed on landscape parchment, the vast range of Kili’s expanse – her ravines etching wrinkles across her ancient face – captivated me.

The mountain’s greens, from rich shadows to hues showcasing rain forests and highland grasses drew me in. Into dreaming. And more than that. To thinking.

How often do we give it consideration, this quality of thought. Its power and its necessity. The uniquely human capacity to consider, to surmise and decide – that is, to use our brain?

Before any venture can get underway – from the Wright brothers winged launch into North Carolina skies to the designing and building of India’s dazzling Taj Mahal to putting together the kids lunch bag for school – the mind must stir.

Surveying Kilimanjaro’s image that morning, my mind did that. It stirred. And a dream was born.

I would set out to climb this mountain. . . and do it with my kids. At the very least, I could try. But there would be a needed sequence about such a heady vision. Some mental pacings must precede the actual ones. Before the climb could ever begin, I must further engage my mind. Questions asked. Mysteries uncovered.

When is the best season of year for such thing? – Which route promises the best chance of success? – Supplies – what equipment, survival gear and food stuff do we gather If my two teens and me are to set foot on Africa’s legendary rooftop? – What will it all cost? (this was a Biggie)

Does this make any sense? Could we actually achieve it? Thoughts. These demanded logic, rationale, kinds of things I’m not so famous for. Still, the thinking part, I came to realize, was indispensable to a happy, adventurous – and completed – climb.

I got encouraged, enthused actually. The task would be daunting, but it was reachable. . . I felt certain. I had lived at the foot of this glorious giant long enough to learn some secrets, catch some glimpses of the possibilities.

Thinking had been happening a while.

So simple strategies began playing in my head – vague and ill-defined at first – of taking on this vast, snow-crowned volcano.

I peered again at Kili’s image lying there atop our dining table, the table itself crafted of timber harvested from other African slopes – Kenya’s Mount Elgon.

On and on I continued thinking. . . and on.

Trekking a mountain to her summit may be much like walking with Christ, I mused. One [sensible] step at a time.

©2018 Jerry Lout

 

 

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A Pivotal Place

Connecting the two words Train and Track evokes images. Linked-up railway cars snaking over a mountain pass or across a sun-beaten desert or through a city’s colorless industrial park.

I was born the fourth child of Clyde Baxter Lout, whose own entry into the world in 1912 followed another birthday by just five years – that of his native Oklahoma – into Statehood.

While both of them, Clyde and Oklahoma, were in their youth assaulted by merciless dust storms and drought, it was only Clyde who could escape the brutal territory, at least for a time. He gathered the few clothing items he could take along to bum his way westward and headed for the nearest rail yard. To one train track, then to another, and another. With each morning’s sunrise to his back he pressed on, riding the rails to a place near Berkeley.

Yet, as he would come to find, that same pair of ‘T’ words, train. . . track, would impact Clyde’s life in a very different kind of way. His gaze was to shift, from squinting along railway lines by the mile to engaging a vision of life itself. He would elect to think deeply, to ponder, to purpose, and – with some help from “the good Lord above” – to even prosper.

Clyde was poor, very poor. With some sort of actual training and a few sensible means to mark out his progress, the young Okie figured he might break past the survival mindset (a condition pretty much defining his whole life) and arrive at an improved state of being.

Certainly, any advancement would beat hoeing cotton at 50 cents a week. But he wouldn’t want that as his grand aim, to merely get out of poverty. He took hold of a notion, teasing him from somewhere inside or outside himself, that he could aim for something loftier than bare survival. Still, he knew that dreaming alone would not get him there. He would have to do some things, two things especially.

Clyde must train. Clyde must stay on track.

Train and Track. In union together, like bonded friends, the two curious elements could make all the difference, helping propel the orphan-boy-turned-adult beyond a life of scarcity and into one of plenty. To material well-being indeed, but maybe to an abundance far greater, a life of riches not measured in coin.

Clyde’s future lay before him. He must choose.

So must we.

©2018 Jerry Lout

 

 

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Gain

“I hustled”.

The strong declaration sprang from my father’s lips. Clyde Baxter Lout was near seventy and I near forty as we chatted. Morning coffee had brewed and I was offering up questions about his early years as a working man.

“Hustle” is an old word. It comes with several different meanings. My father used it for just one.

He applied the term the way Collins English Dictionary does – “If someone hustles, they try hard to earn money or to gain an advantage from a situation.”

Counted among my closer friends are several engineers who came to America’s shores as students from far away places. . . Asia, the Middle East, elsewhere.  They hustled.

Getting schooled in Oklahoma, most had arrived at Tulsa University after finishing undergraduate work in their own homelands. Making their way to my state from places few Oklahomans ever see – Bangalore, Beijing, Chenai, Tehran, these friends had grown up in cultures separated by long miles and diverse languages. But they carried this thing in common.

In their daily hustle, the bright young men labored energetically, sacrificing sleep, going after carefully-defined goals.

They apprenticed.

In time job fairs came along. Industries took notice. Meanwhile, for several of the internationals, another kind of shift had come. Discovering the Christian faith through friends in Tulsa, a number trusted their lives to Jesus. So life in another dimension began. A bigger life, one in Jesus’ kingdom.

On the other hand Clyde Baxter had started off as an orphan.

Though lacking formal schooling beyond tenth grade (cotton fields calling him to scratch out a living in the great depression years), he hustled. Fleeing Oklahoma poverty on rumbling freight trains, he moved westward, and landed his first California job as a ditch digger. When a “plumber’s helper” ad caught his attention, the young Okie went for an interview.

“Young man, if you will give energy and attention to it, we will make you an apprentice.”

“What is an apprentice?”

©2018 Jerry Lout

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A Hungering

Jesus of Nazareth invited two apprentices to walk and work with him. Then came a third. . . then another and another. Since those early days, the increase of his trainees-in-Christlikeness has carried forward until their number now spans the globe.

Jesus knew well the need of passing along insights and wisdom. But also, of modelling his rare kind of power – the power of love – brought here to earth by him from another world. He did this kind of thing at every step, this modelling and training.

As for insights and wisdom, what this master-trainer brought into view went deeper. It went past the understanding and good sense already found among people through centuries of human experience. Further, the compassion he showed left other forms of human caring shallow by comparison.

Many historians measure this Middle-eastern figure, whose name is more commonly spoken than any other in history, as the most gifted, the most brilliant human ever to live. Yet he didn’t hold his understanding to himself, wasn’t stingy with his gems. Rather, Jesus offered up to any who would take him seriously, his own qualities – wisdom and truth – which any sensible person might eagerly receive.

So, this carpenter-turned-rabbi – as a feature of his mission – recruited to himself a company of students, of learners who might grow to live as he lived. Might even, to a surprising measure, become as he was.  Many of Jesus’ apprentices arrived on the scene from ordinary backgrounds. Some were well-educated, others not, some well to do, others not so much.

They would travel with him in climates both calm or stormy. They tasted samplings of popularity and favor and weathered seasons of scorn and rejection.

These disciple-apprentices dined in community. They wrapped up countless action-filled days reflecting together before an open flame at a makeshift fire pit, often at places a good way from their homes. Their minds and hearts took in what they were able of their coach’s actions and sayings. Time in each another’s presence stretched them. They quibbled. They fussed. They were in training.

When one or two of the group asked him for advice on how to pray, Jesus answered in sensible language, “Pray this way. . .”

He also modeled praying. His apprenticing meant that he  would (in a manner unlike others of his day) shift readily into a conversation with the invisible God whom he knew to be among them. This would occur easily, naturally when a time or circumstance called for it, which tended to be often.

When their food supply got small, Jesus talked to them about carefree living, then, on occasion would completely surprise them, bringing forth a meal. Such actions would leave them in wonder and deeply curious as to this man’s other-worldly nature.

Never one who seemed rushed or fidgety, he chuckled easily with his apprentice-friends. And, like any skillful mentor, he corrected them without timidity, apology or fanfare.

On a given day Jesus’ corrective counsel might be directed to one or two of the apprentices or he may address a thing meant for the wider community.  Regardless, corrective action was each time offered in the interest of serving both his highest good and theirs. The trainees grew to own this.

The longer they walked with him, the less they wished for the former life, their old ways of being. It began to feel as though the rabbi was growing them, little by little, to become very much like himself. This seemed a good thing. They hungered for more.

©2018 Jerry Lout

 

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A New Coach

The apprentices did not tire of their hardships in the company of the carpenter-turned-rabbi. Roughing it with Jesus deepened them somehow. And, while his parables and assignments at times perplexed them, they were never at risk of getting bored.

As he labored at offering up truth and clarifying it where needed, Jesus remained always-present to them. His favorite moments seemed to be found engaging these clearly flawed but hungering men. The rabbi taught with warmth and wit and they would catch the occasional upturned smile in the flicker of a crackling night fire. At other times his voice was marked by a distressful tone. This would not often pass unnoticed, their searching eyes exploring his troubled features. Clearly he knew things – deep, disturbing, wonderful things – not yet ripe for sharing.

While they at times tracked his sayings with clear-eyed understanding, the recruited apprentices weren’t always the keenest of trainees.

He could leave them feeling uneasy by his prescriptions for living life. Sometimes they were utterly baffled over a point he seemed bent on making. In these times, to his credit, he never demeaned them. Rather, the rabbi gently drew them in. . . to reflecting, to pondering, in ways the best educators through history have commonly done.

Jesus’s first team of trainees numbered just twelve. The wildly-diverse company of personalities with their contrasted backgrounds walked with Jesus, under his tutelage a good three years and more.

Partly because of his awful and glorious final acts – yielding up himself as a young man in his prime to a voluntary death, then shockingly emerging fully alive three days later from his garden tomb – the rabbi’s handful of followers came to embrace him fully. And, considering their remarkable Holy Spirit-empowering afterward, how could his company of trainee-disciples possibly remain few!

Being fully divine, Jesus remained entirely man. Human, subject to weariness, to pain, pleasure, hope. Yet he stayed blameless, flawless-of-character, good.

While Jesus was surely qualified to mentor craftsmen in the skills of carpentry and construction, he knew well that his mission lay elsewhere. It was a mission spanning eternity and with all tribes of the human family in view. It was a call of cosmic dimension, an assignment in transforming communities out of all earth’s cultures and languages, into persons remarkably like himself.

While the word apprentice hasn’t always sprung readily to mind when reaching for a label to tag a “Jesus-follower”, it may come as close as any to best portray this mentor-mentee relationship.

Jesus was a master teacher. Beyond this, Jesus supplies not only knowledge for learning but the power needed to effectively apply life-altering truths to raw, in-the-trenches daily living. Bringing his disciples forward into a life as his own, he leads as friend.

A few years back I happened onto the writings of a gentleman in whom the term “apprentice to Jesus” had found a welcome home. He referenced it often. The apprentice word fits Dallas Willard like a favorite pair of gym shoes fits an athlete.

We can likely learn some things from a seasoned Christ-follower apprentice – who, on entering the process, found an entirely new life emerge.              

                               “Follow me as I follow Christ”     – Paul, the apostle

         ©2018 Jerry Lout