drowning – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

November 4, 2022

Abundant

As we hunger on after God he ensures that plenty of life-enhancing nutrients come our way. With him as supplier we don’t fret about scarcity. Rather, we take comfort, even delight, in this wondrous fact. His kingdom into which we have entered and now live overflows in plenty.

‘Supply chain interruption’. The phrase is seldom voiced among those abiding in Jesus, living under his governance. And part of the great news is this – the currency of our Lord’s kingdom. We live by faith. God himself supplies the faith (kingdom currency) needed, and it never ever diminishes.

Everyone has a faith story, even if it is not yet clearly known to them.

We grow to live our lives rooted in things that we believe. . . What we believe about ourselves. What we believe or disbelieve about God, and about the world. Our belief or non-belief about an afterlife beyond the grave.

A person’s behaviors (their routine actions in life) make it clear as to what they actually do believe, what they hold as truth. More about that later.

I first got introduced to the Christian faith as a young child. It was only afterward that I gave much thought to spiritual hunger.

I think everyone gets hungry for God. It is a little like the natural hunger I had that day at the college campus. Yet it is not the same. My mother and father were moved to yearn after God in their time of deep sorrow at the drowning death of their young son. But, whether through a great crisis or simply in a time of honest questionings we sense there is a “something” missing.

For some of us, this hungering is a thing we have not given much thought to. Yet most all people across the world have deep life questions. And we feel the yearning for the something that is beyond ourselves.

In truth we are yearning for him – God. We thirst for his help and we yearn for his companionship. It is him, the One who is ready and able to fill up the hungry space inside us. Indeed, the one by whom and for whom we were made.

French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal offered a word picture,

“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.” *

May 26, 2018

Arrangement

My bride-to-be nearly drowned. She was young at the time, just hours old.

“Mr and Mrs. Barnes, the risks are high. To our knowledge no baby has made it through long-term. But the surgery is the only chance your little girl has.”

Earl and Mary had little time to think it over. A surgical team gathered and a T. E. Fistula repair was scheduled. The life of Alice Ann Barnes – her full body weight shy of five pounds – hung in the balance.

T.E. stood for Tracheosophageol. Sadly, the baby’s esophagus and trachea were defective at birth. Designed to transport her mother’s milk into her stomach, Ann’s esophagus mingled with her air-tube. Thus, any nutrition-rich fluids were sent to her lungs, not her stomach. In 1949 the field of medicine had its limits. Without corrective surgery, death by drowning or malnutrition would likely result.

Anesthetics were administered, their effects carefully watched. The surgeon’s knife found entrance into little Ann’s back. The procedure was underway.

Hours passed as anxious parents waited.

“Her vitals are steady.” Intensive care nurses – hours into post-op – kept a close watch on little Ann. Some likely prayed.

December, 1967. The former pediatrics patient – poised, lovely in her white gown – moved along the church sanctuary’s center aisle and to her waiting groom.

***

Our courtship, Ann’s and mine, had largely played out by long distance – spanning twelve hundred miles and two-and-a-half years. First by old-fashioned letters. Then with my Oklahoma-to-Montana phone calls.

The marriage wasn’t arranged by third-party players, but neither did we magically fall in love. We grew toward one another through the modest media of stationery paper and ballpoint ink, radial-dial phones with long-distance lines transporting two distinctly different accents – one from just south of Canada, the other a stone’s throw from Texas.

We had survived, each of us, our childhood crises of health. To one day embark, united, on a journey unlike any we could have dreamed.

An arranged marriage, one might say. By providence.

July 21, 2015August 28, 2017

Greenwood Lake. Rescue

My father and mother lost their first son to drowning.* Given such trauma I am thankful for the courage they showed later on. When their next two boys reached swimming age.

Tim and I loved water. If it were roomy enough to swim in we weren’t picky about the spot. Mom and dad freed us to that pleasure. . .

Farm ponds and rivers – summertime could find us and our friends reveling in them. The deep blue of rain-filled rock quarries called us. Their depths were bracing, invigorating. At the bottom of one quarry rested a long-abandoned dump truck.

Years before, it somehow descended from the quarry ridge. It rested submerged there now – still upright. What fun, inhaling deeply, diving, navigating the cab interior. Taking turns we mock-drove the old truck until straining lungs obliged us aloft to draw in new oxygen. Then back again, chasing one another through one open window and out the other.

Our favorite swimming hole by far was a pond-turned-commercial pool. A few years earlier, a visionary gentleman at the edge of town added diving boards, changing rooms and a snack canteen to his large pond. A brilliant revenue source, his family’s Greenwood Lake opened for business. It seemed every kid in Okmulgee County frolicked in Greenwood at some point before reaching their late teens.

A lifeguard pulled me from the Lake unconscious early one season. My headfirst dive might have fractured my neck. Thankfully not. The accident sprang from a miscalculation.

Swimming season was freshly opened. The winter months and springtime yielded little rainfall and the shoreline revealed it. Not factoring this, I assumed the lake owners had extended the shoreline – providing a new beach area.

I trotted onto a platform leading to diving areas further out. Stopping short of the diving boards I turned and faced the water.

In previous summers the water here was several feet deep. Being a pond, the cloudy waters kept me from seeing bottom . . . from judging its depth. There wasn’t a new beach. Greenwood was simply low. I dived into water that was inches deep.

I woke up on the grass. The lifeguard was at my shoulder. An onlooker remarked, That kid was lucky, looks like he’ll make it. Minutes later I swam from the shallows to join my brother and our cousin. Aunt Dovie’s son, Paul, was visiting us from Phoenix.

Our life’s trailways hold curious mysteries for us. At times they may link us to something – someone – beyond ourselves. I like to think a benevolent God ensured that an on-duty lifeguard was attentive – ready and alert to rescue this inattentive youngster at Greenwood Lake. I believe the same Creator gently prompted my Aunt Dovie to be attentive – on-duty in Phoenix years ago after the death of Bobby. Dovie intervening for my mother and father with words of rescue. Of life.

April 28, 2015August 28, 2017

Family Addition(s)

It wasn’t an appealing dwelling place for a family but California’s Mojave Desert supplied one perk. Houses didn’t cost much. South African immigrants had assigned retired gold mining communities their names. A two mile drive west of Johannesburg led to Randsburg. Clyde, Thelma and seven-year-old Betty settled into their new home. He paid $150 for the house. His plumbing skills secured work for him at a nearby military base.

Clyde privately pledged that he and Thelma would have no more children. He vowed so during the agonized hours after Bobby’s drowning. For sure, his heart began a slow healing as he read through Bible stories. The life and words of Jesus especially drew him in, bringing more composure. And he sensed growth in his spiritual journey.

Still, something he dreamed after going to bed one night in their small Randsburg home left him astonished.
In his dream he pictured small children whom he couldn’t recall ever seeing before. They were lively, happy at play.

After some moments into the dream a crisp, convicting message – like a theme – overtook his mind. Bringing no further children into the world was not Clyde’s decision to make. Not really. His choosing this path closed the door to receiving precious little ones assigned to their family’s care.

Receiving? Assigned?

In the days following, Clyde could not shrug off images of laughing, playing children nor the dream’s assertion as he experienced it. The matter became a conviction. He yielded.

In due course Thelma delivered their third child. All nine pounds of Timothy Arthur Lout were clearly present. Exclamations erupted at Red Mountain’s hospital.

Now there’s a Big boy! He’s half grown already!

Timothy was still a baby when the family moved once again. Back to the Bay. To Berkeley. My mother (Thelma) later reviewed the setting and its seasons. When you were born, Jerry, Berkeley was just a quiet little college town.

I came into the world one year, one month and one day after my brother, Tim. I skinned up the tip of my nose from regularly rooting face-down into the bed sheets. For this the hospital nurses labeled me ‘little bull’.
How our small-framed mother actually delivered us bruisers, Tim and me, is a marvel. I trumped my brother Tim’s birth weight, tipping the scales at a disquieting ten pounds. A vital, robust life seemed clearly ahead.

During this period a word was finding its way into conversations all around. The word polio.