religious – Jerry Lout ⚬ Writer ⚬ Speaker ⚬ Mobilizer

February 13, 2025February 12, 2025

Making Melody

Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.*

Strings ‘n Things – The name caught on from the start.

Laid back but purposeful, informal yet structured, Strings ‘n Things soon became a popular Saturday evening destination for a handful of future chemists and engineers. Here at week’s end, they could catch a two-hour reprieve from Keplinger Lab.

Having learned to play guitar on a used flat top my dad picked up for nine dollars back in the 50s, an idea had sprung to mind. What if an unobtrusive spot on campus were dedicated as a banjo, violin or guitar venue for the music-inclined international student open to a bit of hang time with a few American friends?

The curricula would be non-academic in nature. Just a simple, unhurried environment with a fiddler or ‘picker’ or two in a fun, intercultural setting. Friends Art and Leah Christie had begun serving in the area with YWAM (Youth With A Mission). Reaching out to Art, an accomplished guitarist, was an easy call to make. Enthused over the Strings ‘n Things concept Art made his way week after week to the Wesley building.

. His musical talent and gentle, relational disposition formed the perfect blend.

The Wesley clock struck Seven. Students descended the steps to the basement, arriving at random times, no one keeping track.

When, after a few minutes the soft buzz of introductions and chitchat trailed off, I gestured to some folding chairs and students settled in.

“Hey, we are glad you all could make it. Before we start talking instruments and so forth, can our friend Art and me take a minute to introduce you to a popular American folk song or two?” With this, out came our guitars.

As Saturday evenings came and went, our Strings ‘n Things music highlighted a blend of genres. Including biblically-sound yet catchy contemporary pieces. Students from a range of backgrounds, religious and otherwise, sat attentively as lyrics of a hymn were broken down, clarified. Then, drawing out the instruments a random voice called, “Let the lessons begin!”

September 14, 2023September 14, 2023

Fountain

“Real prayer comes not from gritting our teeth but from falling in love.”

By the time Richard Foster penned these words in his important book, “Prayer – Finding the Heart’s True Home”, he had gleaned some insights through years of learning to walk with Christ.

Richard had come to recognize that Christian prayer, in its most basic form, is not an exercise to enter into as a religious performance.

Many good and sincere church-goers become burdened down over time under the load of dutiful praying. Conversing with God (the actual meaning of what it is to pray), if engaged as a religious duty becomes a load that crushes.

Yes, serious praying like intercession (deep-hearted appeals for God’s watch-care over other people’s concerns) can feature intense times of wrestling in the arena of spiritual conflict. Still, when the Jesus-follower prays – even with intensity – the praying carries a quality of hope and of trust. Sitting quiet before him – recalling good that he has brought to one’s life – voicing thanksgiving. Prayer entered into in such a heart posture allows the stirring of a fountain within. The love fountain.

The reason? Communing with God in Christ, regardless the form it takes, is marked by faith and hope, of confidence and assurance in Father-God’s loving care. Unlike a vending machine where what happens is all about transaction, the relationship between Jesus and his apprentice is centered in just that. . . Relationship.

Thanksgiving mingled in worship invariably leads to prayer rising heavenward in some fashion. In fact, where these two expressions are offered up in one’s life – thanksgiving and worship – prayer is happening.

Love works that way. It is not self-seeking but generous – even when the answer we may have hoped for does not get realized. Love leans in. Navigating life out of the love fountain ensures teeth-gritting finds no place to land.

June 8, 2023June 9, 2023

In Process

Taking as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.

Wait a minute. . . he did that? I am to do that?

That Serenity Prayer line will rattle a person’s status quo underpinnings.

To take on life as it really is we must deal with resistance toward and engagement with the stink of the journey.

In what universe do you find a lame man with a limp openly bearing witness to his “beautiful feet on the mountains bearing good news”*? Can beauty flower and flourish in the middle of contrary forms? Are not all bad things. . . well. . . bad?

The religious tradition I was fostered in generally prescribed an unwritten list of responses to adversity whenever it came calling. Resist – Rebuke – Refuse.

Pain does not bring good to a person’s life. Resist it.

Adversity is not a pathway to human betterment. Rebuke it.

God is not one to bring his children into places of suffering. Refuse it.

In some communities, too, a notion prevails that anything of a non-religious nature is to be avoided – certainly not enjoyed. In my old age I’m drawn to jazz music, gentle instrumentals. Taking in cool smooth blends of light piano, an old upright bass and soft guitar or sax brings a kind of therapeutic effect. I digress.

Jesus took the world as he found it. He resisted straightening out all the bad stuff during his years walking the earth. He did not tackle in a quick moment all the long string of horrors, did not rid the world of them. Not then and not now. The unspeakable pain brought on from evil did not cease upon his entry to the world. He came to the world as it was and lived in it, even ministered in it – where it was, the way he found it – not the way he would have wished it to be.

It seems that God (being all-knowing and wise) opts to allow many of man’s choices – destructive as they often are – to play out unblocked on history’s stage. For now, anyway. If righteous Jesus can exercise self-control enough to hold off righting the world’s wrongs by a sweep of his hand, is he not able to supply his disciples grace and patience to live and serve in the midst of the same?

The fact that we are not charged with remedying the world of all its ills comes as a freeing thing to the soul. While we are to steward the roles we are assigned in bringing about change, we understand that straightening the dysfunctions of our own selves calls for plenty attention all its own.

April 27, 2017August 28, 2017

Conditioning

I agonized the fresh image in my mind. More than haunting, the scene from this morning of the stricken child assaulted my senses. A torment ensued.

I stood behind the rough-hewn pulpit looking out at twenty worshippers. A shudder gathered in my middle back then up and across my shoulders. How could this have happened? How could I have driven away, on to my precious commitment?

Commitment. The word rang hollow. I had left the child, his small body sprawled lifeless on the roadway. It didn’t matter that another vehicle hit him. I had driven on. I had left him there.

Although I had lived in Africa for more than seventeen years, the events of that morning were unique. I had witnessed more roadway carnage my first six months on the continent than in all previous years elsewhere. Still. I could not distance myself from this morning’s image. Even as I read Scripture to the gathered faithful, the scene looped repeatedly. Over and over.

At the accident spot the hit-and-run motorist had evidently slowed, then sped out of sight. Moments afterward I had approached. On seeing the lifeless child I slowed my truck and steered it partly off the pavement.

A frantic, hysterical young woman in her lovely Sunday dress faced the highway, only feet from the fallen boy. It was in that second, another kind of nightmare, one of a repulsive kind, took form in my religiously-conditioned mind. Indeed, the religious component itself made it all the more repulsive. I glanced to my watch and moved on.

Standing at the pulpit now, I seemed to age. Never mind that another vehicle stopped to lend aid – a fact I had witnessed through my rear-view mirror. And what does this speak, Jerry? I asked myself derisively – self-cynicism hatching inside a house of worship. Compassionate action through a rear-view mirror? Right.

The facts were obvious. Severely so. I had chosen reason over compassion, rationale above mercy.

Already another car had stopped, the gray Landrover, I had reasoned.

I, on the other hand – I, the missionary en route to a preaching appointment – had driven on. Me, with my Sunday church duty to perform. A muffled groan settled in my chest and elected to remain.

My sermon ended. Hours lumbered past and Sunday mercifully fell behind me. But on Monday and then into weeks ahead I questioned, Would my soul one day recover from the shame that’s settled over me, of religion-bred dereliction, the self-loathing of letting meetings trump mercy? Considering the scene for the hundredth time I doubted.

Guilt. Remorse. Blame. Judgment. Even the terms themselves seem to stagger under their own condemning weight. Especially so when a person owns them to himself.

The prophet assures of comfort, “His compassions fail not” – Lamentations 3:22

But is even God’s mercy itself equal to something like this?