habits – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

June 20, 2024

Steps Forward

Sensing that another of life’s thresholds lay ahead for me – one of greater bearing than others – I texted my pastor, requesting a visit.

Not long after his ‘dumpster dive’ narrative (the lone part of the sermon I recall from that Sunday morning), Roger had begun laying the groundwork for a twelve-step venture fitting a specific niche of persons. Men serving in Christian ministry.

A Step program had already been serving our faith community for some time, yielding some beautiful fruit along the way. Through Bible-centered curricula facilitated by a compassionate, Christ-loving husband/wife team, Jim and Pam, a number of souls had – for their first time ever – drunk from springs of undiluted hope. The program, by now widely available and spreading, carried the label Celebrate Recovery (‘CR’).

Enter Roger, a “man the cloth”, who inserted a third letter, sandwiched between the C and the R. The result – a kind of hybrid version nicknamed ‘C.P.R.’ – the ‘P’ loosely representing the term ‘Pastor’.

Imagine. A recovery program concerned with hurts, habits and hangups of preachers, pastors, missionaries, youth ministers and the like. Remarkably (or not so remarkably), Roger’s CPR groups – the first followed by another, then another – never lacked for signups.

In a study spanning a recent calendar year Barna Research noted that 42 percent of pastors had considered leaving full-time ministry. While a combination of factors can give rise to such troubling data, a common theme has surfaced. A high number of leaders in the Lord’s work suffer from a sense of isolation.

Yet, men (vocational churchmen included) connecting routinely with other men in honest, redemptive dialogue are finding themselves ushered into a place of oxygen. A doorway of hope starts opening. Wounds get disclosed. Fears and hiddenness get unveiled. Healing enters. Recovery comes.

Jesus occupies such settings. Men know the empowering presence, in the company of friends. This became my story and remains so today.

By the time of my first interactive session with a CPR band of brothers, much water had passed beneath the proverbial bridge. Some with murky currents indeed. Here, in time, I would muster adequate courage to bring to light the account of a sexual assault, of unsavory influences, and a history of associated brokenness.

I was a child when *Lawrence took advantage. Hiddenness – my behavior default – had kept the incident sealed for beyond six decades.

I would learn afresh that from God there issues love that, as the hymn writer worded it, will not let me go.

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.

February 9, 2023February 4, 2023

Wanting

Apprenticing to Jesus bears fruit of the finest variety – kingdom fruit. God’s kingdom is that place where his will is done, “Thy kingdom come”.

Once a clear “Yes, I’m in I will be a Jesus-apprentice” is resolved, a new kind of season gets underway. And, hopefully, goes forward into a lifetime.

This is the season of habits, but habits leading to something far richer than the mere exercise of repeated practices. The season of habits, employed under the guidance and power of the Spirit offers promise of immense gratification.

This is the joy of inside-out transformation. Think of it. You and I humbly growing/changing through clearly laid out movements, into a vivid likeness of the one who invites, “Learn of me”.

We need to ask ourselves a question. Is the average, everyday Jesus-follower called to this radical kind of thing? Incorporating specific practices into routine life that would lead the believer to full-on Christlikeness? What about you?

Over and over the New Testament makes clear that every Christian is granted salvation with an assumption that life-long growth and change lie ahead,

“. . speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ”*

Men and women through history affirm the high aspiration, A spiritually mature Christian is “one whose whole character—dispositions, words, and actions—emulates the character of Jesus Christ himself.”**

Want.

Training for a life as a bull rider when you are, at your core, wired to work with spread sheets in the accounting field is a path that might well lead to despair (if not an injured spine).

Being a Jesus’ apprentice happens only in the life of the person who wants it. A genuine inner desire will mark the man or woman, youth or senior, who chooses discipleship to Jesus as their core life aim. Without a hungering for life in the company of Jesus, any ‘choice’ of apprenticeship can take the person to one of two places. Neither, a really fun place to be.

January 5, 2023January 4, 2023

Which Me?

Turning my Sherlock Holmes microscope away from other people’s lives – their habits of mood and attitude and behavior – I nervously aim the instrument to myself. Assuming I am taking an honest inventory, sweat droplets begin beading on my forehead.

In my (imaginary) self-exam mode, I assess how I am doing in a brief series of 24-hour segments. Suppose that early on, I might register a good day (part of a good day?) where my natural responses to people and circumstances rank pretty well on the ‘selflessness’ scale. I start feeling a little heady over this, start edging toward self-congratulatory mode.

But right when the ego celebration is about to launch, I catch a nagging reminder that this is not all that I am called upon to have brought about in my life. I am a willing and, yes, loving follower of Christ.

I begin drilling down beyond the superficial. And find that the onion surface conceals a lot of layers. I rediscover that I am a whole being – body, mind, heart, will. What if my master, Jesus, is calling me to full-on renovation? That would mean a lot of things.

It would mean the disassembling – portion by portion – of the entire bundle (thinkings, feelings, choosings, etc), followed by the methodical rebuilding of all. His way. After all, if he is set on my growing to fully resemble him (in character, patience, generosity, service, peace, joy, love), a hefty amount of ‘me’ has got to go. Such transformation would mean my being somehow ‘traded off’ for a better ‘me’. Interestingly, someone* wrote a useful book about that very thing, “The Me I Want to Be”.

Pondering all this, I pause a moment and offer a half-whispered question, “Is this what Jesus asks of a disciple? Can the apprentice get to the place the master is leading him toward without the disciple’s all-out surrender to a renovated life? A radically changed life?