Category: Jerry’s Reflections

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Observing

Observe

Watching my Suzuki dirt bike hoisted onto a wobbling, home-built canoe at the edge of a flooded river, gave me pause. Did I make a smart move?

My unsettled mind calmed the next few minutes as the two tribal men skillfully executed their self-assigned duties. I looked on in growing admiration.

These fellas know a thing or two about rivers. And of cargo management for home-built canoes.

The reflection in my head took form after I witnessed a donkey traversing those waters under the young men’s management, emerging at the opposite shore, her hee-haw still intact.

In a similar way I’ve found it often only takes a little observing to appreciate praiseworthy qualities in people – their dispositions, skill sets, personalities, their manner.

In this respect, Jesus has become my favorite subject in people-watching.

Indeed, he himself – this son of a blue-collar worker growing up in an unexceptional middle-eastern village – honed his own set of observing skills. Sharpening them as keenly as he did the carpentry tool finding its home in his saw-dust-sprinkled grip.

Engage

“Here, Yeshua, see how we mark the place just this side of the knot hole? This is where we cut the plank. Now, watch closely where I position the saw. . .” Papa Joseph patiently tutored the youngster, modelling for him the carpentry craft.

To excel at a thing – to move little by little into expertise – any person ever trained in a skill knows the drill.

  • Watch (observe) the trainer, listening, paying attention as they do their work
  • Imitate the manner and movements of the mentor while he looks on, coaches, corrects
  • Do the work – produce ‘fruit’ reflecting the quality of the master’s own workmanship and of his character

Jesus did this. Jesus trained his friends while adopting for himself role of trainee. Remarkable, really. The writer of Hebrews offers a pithy insight about Jesus, “He learned.”

Paul the apostle followed suit, the Damascus-road convert boldly recruiting others to ‘board his gospel canoe’:

“Follow me as I follow Christ.”

Become

I want to become like Jesus.

Through the years the yearning has ebbed and flowed in my deep interior.

Not in me alone. The cry is common to Christ-followers all around. Common because nothing else slakes our thirst for meaning. A cry because, at the core, this is our design. We are made for it – for apprenticeship to Jesus. Made to be formed into a likeness very much resembling him. In  character. In life.

How does such a life-altering enterprise get underway?

My boyhood days growing up on a farm stirs a thought.

©2018 Jerry Lout

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Invitation

The membrane-cloaked calf lay still from exhaustion on the dew-soaked Bermuda grass. The little bull had, the past few seconds with the gallant aid of his mama, thrust his way outward from her womb and into Autumn’s sharp early-morning  air.

Wanting to grow to be like Jesus comes naturally for any born-anew believer. It is as natural a thing as conception – gestation – birthing and maturing are natural to reproductive life.

The progression, in fact, sounds normal. That is because it is normal. The thing that does not come naturally (automatically) for the believer, though, is the actual doing it. . . becoming like Jesus. At least not for a good while. Not for most.

Transformation to Christlikeness, however, is not unrealistic. Nor is it such a hard thing to make headway in. The issue that makes growing into the likeness of Jesus most difficult is likely our simple lack of know-how. This had been true for me, no question. I wanted change like crazy. Make me like you, Jesus. I just didn’t know how to start getting there.

Reflective musings

So, moving from being a ‘not-much-like-Jesus’ person to becoming very much like him. Are there ways to go about this, ways to understand how?  Can there be things, we press the matter further, “hands-on, practical things – I could learn to do? Could do together with Him, leading me to pleasurable rhythms of Christ’s joy, his love, service, character and life. . . For real? That I could grow to live in that curious easy yoke he seemed to matter-of-factly invite us to?”

Easy yoke? The easy had eluded me. And for quite a long time. How could I start, where to begin?

The birthing language helps me get a handle on something.

“Oh, my dear children!” Paul writes. “I feel as if I’m going through labor pains for you again, and they will continue until Christ is fully developed in your lives” (Galatians 4.19  NLT)

The fellow credited for writing much of the New Testament uses here the birthing metaphor to help us catch the idea of God’s means of bringing the change we yearn after. We catch a feeling too for how passionately the Holy Spirit wishes this for us. Labor pains. We can’t help getting the feeling he really means it. Christ – radically developing us, reproducing his nature and character within our lives. Freely. Easily. . . Remarkable.

For a good while – decades actually – I struggled over this thing. A discussion, mostly silent, went on in my head and my heart.

  1. Once a person is saved, brought to faith in Christ, a new beginning has launched, right.

The believer isn’t born into the family of faith to stay an infant. We are born to develop, to grow in the faith, to mature, be transformed. We are to get better at being a Christian. This is what he is saying, what he is after.

Every child of God, every one of us, is handed the oxygen-charged assignment. To change. And, what is more, sliding our neck into an easy yoke with Jesus us sounds more like an invitation to dance than to trudge forward under a burdensome, ever-crushing load. What if Jesus is approaching. Offering his hand, extending a question.

May I have this dance?

©2018 Jerry Lout

 

 

 

 

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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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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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Follow

For years my faith was out of sorts. Not that it lacked truth. Or strength. Or substance (though this could be a subject for another day).

My faith bobbled and wobbled from a lack of understanding how it was meant to be applied. . . or not applied. Especially where actual life formation was concerned. How I was meant to grow – tools to move me there – actual steps to Christlikeness.

A car-towing venture in Africa during the ‘60s might illustrate (a blog entry at this site labeled Drag Race, relates the drama in full).

Two men. Two cars. One of the vehicles, a Jeep, has its engine running. It’s towing the other – a disabled Volkswagen Beetle.

All went well until, navigating a long, downhill slope of dirt road, the less-seasoned Beetle driver – his car gaining speed – elected to pass the Jeep. Yes, to move in front of the lead car. . . Tow rope secure, in place.

His act was not one of the better options open to him. The driver was abruptly schooled in a basic principle. The tow rope would prove a friend as long as its use was rightly applied.

In my hopes of maturing in areas of Christlikeness I failed (like the VW pilot) to position myself rightly in relation to my leader.

It is the wise Jesus-follower who keeps the Rabbi’s sandal-prints in view. Simply moving forward as apprentice-in-training, eyeing the master, taking signals from him. Rather than the alternative – charging. . . or meandering [the speed doesn’t seem to matter] – off independently.

Actions taken in the hope of life transformation fall to two categories. Dallas Willard offers one of them as the clear choice, stating that effective life-change for the good rests on this critical approach – Training vs Trying.

Like the poor, distracted driver, I’ve spent a lot of my energy trying to keep myself aright, often inattentive to a useful point. The fellow in the lead has a better view of the landscape, holds the necessary power at his disposal, and knows just where we’re headed.

Entrusting my understanding to his recommended way – the power needed supplied in full and within easy reach – I might enter a more hopeful process. Not apart from effort, to be sure, this further journey into his likeness. But surprisingly effective, richly hopeful and actually less labor-intensive. In the Rabbi’s language – an easy yoke.

I was at last entering a means that may help me avoid the wrong use of my lifeline, sparing my ‘mobility’ being toppled sideways in the dust.

The rabbi-teacher inviting me to a better means.

“A more excellent way” – 1 Corinthians 12:31

©2018 Jerry Lout       [Ian Espinosa  photo credit. Crossroads]

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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