Tag: Jesus

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A Day of Thanksgiving

“Somebody from his home village sent it to him. Someone with a grudge. The envelope with that stuff inside came hand-delivered yesterday and he’s been like this since.”

I thought of the things that led up to this moment. ‘Curse updates’ don’t often happen in Oklahoma. But this thing seems really serious. 

My friend, Jerry, had summoned the unusual parcel. We noticed the opened envelope bulged a bit. In it was a strange assortment – random, spooky things not fit for having around.

“Elements of a curse. It’s what this is. Whoever sent it to Omondi wasn’t playing games. They planned real physical and mental harm for him. Even death. Take a look at these bone fragments, the ashes mixed in, these bits of rock.”

We eyed the elements warily. Something became clear in those moments. The recipient of this “gift”, the young vocational student, knew he had been cursed. His fear was real. Omondi knew he could die at the hand of a power behind these items. Invisible but real, a terribly dark force – too strong to withstand.

Jerry and I stood silently, each in our own thoughts. Both of us anxious. Each of us sensed the other was praying, groping for guidance. How do you contend with this kind of thing? In another setting one could shrug it off as a game of foolish superstition. But we sensed this to be a full-on display of an evil presence, dispatched somehow to render harm. What could we do?

A thought had begun stirring in me. Pushing past a temptation to just ignore it, I turned to my friend.

“Jerry, would you mind if we try something?” He waited for me to go on. “Can someone bring matches? I think we need to urge this young man to resist, that he fight this thing in the power of Christ.”

Only partly-sure of my instinct, I continued. My confidence grew.

“I believe he needs to break this curse and we can be there, through it with him. We can pray. But I do think he needs to set these things on fire and destroy them. It will be his statement of God’s claim on his life. If he’s willing to, that is.” Jerry nodded.

As I had been speaking the words I knew I was out of my depth. I felt I may be trembling on the inside as much as Omondi was on the outside.

Matches were brought. We moved to an enclosure and sat on the floor, Jerry and I at either side of him.

After sharing Scripture with Omondi, affirming the goodness and the truth of Jesus and the power of his name, we asked him if he agreed with Jesus’ words. “Do you believe that God has power above all?”. He nodded slightly and we pressed ahead, inviting him to offer himself fully to Jesus Christ. Slowly, deliberately he voiced a prayer of surrender to God. My friend, Jerry and I, never let up calling on the Lord from our hearts. After a moment I looked into the young man’s eyes.

“Good. OK, now Omondi, do you renounce all witchcraft, any kind of it? Do you reject all spirit forces that oppose the Lord Jesus? Can you say that you do?” In a weak response he whispered yes. When asked one more time, he came back with an assertive “Yes”.

“OK”. I raised the envelope with its contents before him. Some apprehension seemed to play at his eyes. But his fear had lessened and my friend and I sensed Omondi was choosing freedom. We kept praying, “Help him, Lord Jesus. Be near.”

“Alright now, let’s light the match.”

At first his hand trembled with such intensity that I took his hand in mine and we gripped the match together. Thankful for his clear resolve to continue, we struck the match and lit the envelope and contents, Jerry and I voicing thanksgivings to Jesus the whole time. And a beautiful thing followed.

Witnessing the flame take over the elements, we felt a release of joy. The three of us came to our feet. Jerry and I called out in joy and conviction, praising the name of our Lord. Fear had left. Had left us all. Omondi’s head pain went away. Deliverance had come.

Afterwards, as we prepared to leave, the name of a pastor I knew from Omondi’s home area came to my mind. I sent a message to him. The two connected in coming days.

At the end of the day we were at peace. Wow.

The power of Christ had prevailed over raw evil. And two young – less-than-fearless – missionaries had been invited to take part. No wonder it’s called Good News.

We had witnessed the display on this day the authority of Christ’s name. A power greater than witchcraft, greater than fear and even death. The power of love.

It was a day of thanksgiving.

©2017 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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Culture Leap

It wasn’t long and an opportunity to dismiss a house guest came my way.

Another visit to our home by Pastor Tom. Again, discussing church matters.

Twenty minutes or so into our chat – the second round of our respective tea cups nearing empty – we  each knew our time to wrap up the visit had arrived.

Though I had it on good counsel my next move was called for, this would be my first time to tell a visitor to leave my house. Taking in a slow breath I rose from the chair, and smiling broadly, took a couple steps toward him, extending my hand.

“Pastor Tom. . . it’s been good seeing you.”

Before the phrase had left my lips, I caught a look in his eyes that signaled all would be well – that sending my visitor to the door was not an act of rudeness, rejection or idiocy.

Tom’s smile flashed warmly, his gleaming eyes conveying pleasure – and likely, I gathered –  relief. I felt I could almost read his thoughts: Ah, the missionary from America finally gets it!

Taking up residence in another culture, whether across town or across the globe, brings with it mystery. Hurdles. Discomfort. Yet. . . Once sincere attempts are made to adapt, occasional doors to astonishing surprises fling open.

                               ***

“Pastor Jerry, please may we welcome you and Sister Ann. Our new child has come! Meet us at our home for tea.”

Ten months earlier the South Nyanza woman had stepped forward for prayer in our little Migori church. She and her husband wanted to grow a family but were unable to conceive. Her eyes were pleading.

“Please pray.”

We bowed. Petition went heavenward in Jesus’s name. Time moved on. Months passed, and I had all but forgotten the moment.

We got to the home mid-afternoon. The new parents, overtaken with joy, brought out folding chairs to the modest courtyard, receiving us in celebration of their newborn.

We and our hosts sipped sweet chai, helping ourselves to servings of toasty, deep-fried mandazis.

Then came the introduction – their “miracle baby” – a boy. Special expressions of honor are sometimes assigned a person deemed helpful on the occasion of a child being born. A namesake.

Common surnames among the Luo people begin with the letter ‘O’.

“Thank you, Pastor Jerry, for praying that day.” The mother paused. She and her husband smiled,

“Meet Jerry Lout Okech.” 

On any marathon journey of a missionary, special moments emerge unlike any other. Humbling. Sacred. Joyous. The mid-1970’s tea visit in Luo-land marked such a time.

© 2017 Jerry Lout

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Learning Curve

It’s unnerving getting interrupted when giving a public talk – more-so when demons are involved.

Through our Kenya and Tanzania years I grew thankful for the wisdom and courage of African servants of Jesus. Many challenged me in positive ways – not so much by direct words, but by life-example – in things like discernment and spiritual authority.

Scenario: How do you counsel the second wife of an unbelieving polygamous husband who has come to faith in Christ?

Such tricky problems, I discovered, don’t get easily fixed through pat answers by well-meaning outsiders. Put another way, simple solutions do not fare well in the world of the complex. Cultural divides compound things. Reconciling family traditions to the Way of Jesus demands patience, grace and wisdom. What a relief discovering I served among church leaders who – though some lacked greatly in overall Bible knowledge – understood how to rightly address baffling questions that I and my fellow expats were, frankly, clueless about.

***

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.” (as usual, few people can distill a truth better than C.S. Lewis)

What’s with all the screaming?

The lake region was a magnet to demons, or so it appeared. Generations of witchcraft practice seemed to fling regional doors open to dark displays of the invisible underworld.

Taking my place behind a simple wooden pulpit I rested my Bible there and surveyed the gathering. A light lake breeze made its way inland now and then to blunt the oppressive mid-day heat. It was District Convention time and congregations from the area had set up makeshift shelters of straw to shield from the sun’s brutal rays. Three days of teaching, of celebrating, of praying and of feasting were getting underway.

I had barely begun my message when a clearly troubled woman rose in the audience. Her first cries were soft but quickly became louder. A rhythmic chant followed, growing more shrill, more distressing by the moment. Soon she seemed out of control. . . or under the control of some alien influence.

Without my uttering a word or signaling for any help, two tribal gentlemen moved quickly to the woman’s side. Addressing her in moderate but deliberate tones, the men succeeded in relocating her to a space a short distance from our gathering. I learned later on that these intervening men had experience in exorcising bad spirits from the demonically-troubled.

My audience seemed unrattled by the interruption and I resumed preaching. Several minutes of my early remarks from scripture were only slightly muffled by shouts from the deliverance quarters, “Come out of her. Out in Jesus’ Name!”  All the while the poor woman’s unnatural voice ebbed and flowed with irregular volume. At last all went silent. Soon the freed lady re-entered the meeting and conducted herself in a perfectly civil manner.

Again I thanked God it was they – the wise and Spirit-equipped Africans – who answered the call to such crises, and to puzzlements “beyond our pay grade”. Gaining appreciation that useful missionaries. . . if they are anything. . . are observers. Learners.

Thank you, Lord. And help us.

©2018 Jerry Lout

 

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Aidini

“I go to the Coast to mock him. And to beat him when he shows the lie.”

The big man was strong, menacing. Anyone having experience with Alexander Aidini knew his threat was not small talk.

“He is no man of God, this foreigner!” the angry African went on. “He comes to our land a trickster. Come, we shall beat him together, all of us. We go to Mombasa!”

The object of Aidini’s contempt was an American preacher. T. L. Osborn had come with his evangelistic team from Oklahoma to Kenya’s coastal city on the Indian Ocean, “to preach the gospel, to proclaim Jesus Christ in power. . . to heal and deliver and bring salvation.” He labeled the open-air meetings “crusades”.

Osborn’s preaching campaigns had been many and were known to draw thousands,  with large numbers of sick and suffering among them. Aidini was sure all was a hoax to exploit the masses. He would show it up for what it was.

Among the half dozen toughs accompanying Aidini was a man whose mother was blind.

“Bring your mother with us, bring Mama Zaila. When the white man makes prayer for healing in the meeting, we will put her there. When her eyes remain dark and she is not well this will show the lie. And there we will move, we will break the mzungu just there!”  Three days travel brought them to their destination.

Leaving their Land Rover beneath a gnarled tree next to a kiosk, the group entered the stream of tribal people making their way by foot toward the blaring loudspeaker. Mombasa’s port-city-atmosphere with its salty aroma was heavy, humid.

“Take care, Mama Zaila, do not rush. Hold tight to my arm.” The woman clung to her son’s forearm, her useless eyes staring into blackness.

Africa is a vast place with pockets of equally dense populations swarming across sprawling cities. Still, the crowd flooding Mombasa’s big outdoor field, was bigger than any the Congolese visitors had known. It was clear the name Osborn evoked interest.

The band of half-dozen strangers from a thousand miles westward pushed their way deeper into the crowd, their goal the big wooden stage where the mzungu preacher and his wife, Daisy sat. At either side of the American couple were invited local dignitaries along with a number of Africa church and mission heads.

Poised at last before the stage, the Congolese gang – their sightless companion in tow – awaited their moment. For Aidini it could not come soon enough.

©2018 Jerry Lout

 

 

 

 

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Undone

Preacher Osborn’s voice rang strong, echoing across the mass of gathered humanity. On the deceitfulness of sin, its destructive fruit in a life. Then of the power of forgiveness, of the cross of Jesus, of hope in him.

The evangelist paused, then turned to a different emphasis.

“Do we have anyone troubled in their body tonight?”

As the air hung quiet above the throng, heads began nodding. Calls of “Ndiyo” sounded from the Mombasa crowd.

“If you are lame, cannot move about well or cannot see through your eyes. . . if your body has stopped working in some way. And if you believe Jesus came to free you, to heal you both soul and body, this is your time to believe him. Do we believe Jesus?”

A ringing chorus rose, “Yes!”

“Well, now we’re going to pray. Remember it is Jesus who heals. I cannot heal anyone. Jesus. He is the deliverer. As the book of Hebrews tells us, ‘Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever!’ Tell me now, is he the same for your life? Can you trust his love, trust his power? (pause) Believe him! He wants you well.”

The evangelistic with the soft Oklahoma drawl held firmly to his mic. His voice was passionate, marked with sincerity. “Now, let me pray with you. The resurrected Jesus is here. And he will heal. . . will deliver in these moments just now.”

  1. L. Osborn prayed and the words came simple, clear, strong, with evident conviction. Not a lengthy prayer.

“Now friends, if anyone brought a deaf friend here today, you check with that friend. Look them in the face. Ask them, can you hear?”

As the minister went on with prayer, brief words of guidance and of referencing the Bible, a shout erupted a few feet from where he stood, “Ayeee! Ayeee!”

The shouting voice was Zaila’s. She had willed her eyes open the moment the preacher had called out a phrase, “In Jesus’ name, be healed!” A momentary lull had followed, then. . .

“Ayeee, Ayeee, Ayeee!!”

Wide-eyed with vision, Zaila’s shout of triumph startled Alexander Aidini who stood inches away facing her. Her outburst continued. “I see! I see! . . . I see your face, Mzee Aidini! I see you, I see!!”

The hardened Aidini had tasted little personal fear over the years. If fear was found near him, it was usually him bringing it to others. Fear had not come his way. But now.

Alexander’s inner self trembled. The big man quaked, coming undone in the presence of a force unlike anything he had known.

A shouting, crying Zaila went on, caught up in astonished delight. “Mzee! Mzee Aidini! Nakuona (I am seeing you)! Mzee, hii ni Yesu! – It is Jesus. Jesus!”

At last, Aidini, overcome by conviction, drew himself together. He found his voice.

“I want to get saved. Tell me. How do I get saved?”

©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