Phoenix – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

August 14, 2025August 13, 2025

A Greater Story

There is an interesting thing about vision. Once a person catches sight of a forward-looking hope or dream, they usually move toward it with only a tiny glimpse of additional things to follow. What they hold is a sketchy outline at best. No neatly printed, detailed contract is laid out before them – not to mention fine print!

The life-change adventure begins when we start realizing that “our vision is not our vision alone”. Indeed, when the presence of the Divine makes himself known somewhere along the way, it is then that we may start catching the wonder that his vision overlaps mine and mine converges with his. A new story is now taking shape. God’s story becoming mine as the two streams of narrative (his/mine) merge into one – much like the blending of threads forming a tapestry – eventually fused to make history, i.e. HiStory.

In not having a contract neatly incorporating fine print detail, we discover a priceless insight – usually well into our pilgrimages. We have been spared much of what we were not ready for at any given crossroad on our long and beautiful and hard and precious trek.

Learn from the past, look to the future. . live in the present.*

Now is the favorable time**

Parting from a world of rain-starved earth and barren cotton fields (Dust Bowl territory), Clyde and Thelma lived in the present. In time “the present” became their past. What a surprise it would have been to either of them had they discovered beforehand that they would one day come to joyous faith in a loving Savior for whom their hearts longed. And how distressing, that the life of their young son would be snatched from them by the swift waters of a Phoenix irrigation canal.

It was in the “present moment” of grief that my mother and father’s story merged with a greater story, a forever story.

July 24, 2025July 23, 2025

Beyond Commonplace

Clutching her tan suitcase, Thelma stepped aboard the Greyhound bus. With her free hand she swept a film of dust from an empty seat. Dust. It was like a crazed intruder. “What is it like anyway”, Thelma wondered, “the Golden State?”*

During the writing of Living With A Limp I would periodically pause and immerse myself in scenes of the imagination. The aim was to re-live as best I could a crisis here, an adventure there from true-life happenings of a bygone era. I had been granted through the years the luxury of catching bits and pieces of story as shared and then repeated in various settings by my near and distant kin. So LIMP is personal for me.

Many, if not most, works of memoir call up a collection of narratives featuring among the principal characters any number of close family members.

Thelma Christine Bay, the excited, apprehensive. westward-bound country girl, would traverse seventeen hundred miles by bus. My (future) mother had tasted her share of scarcity through most of her growing-up years. The onset of the Great Depression followed immediately by long years of drought across the Southern Plains (forming the Dust Bowl), made survival itself a burdensome day-by-day task.

My mother’s Schulter – eight miles to the south of Okmulgee – Berkeley, Phoenix, Mohave Desert, (again) Berkeley and finally Okmulgee habitations did find her at certain seasons plodding along through that mundane ordinariness common to most of earth’s pilgrims. Still, hers was clearly no insignificant life.

But then, neither is mine. Nor yours.

There is no such thing as an ordinary life**

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.