Following Jesus

When I was ten years old and school was out for the summer, my parents let me spend the break in Northeast Mississippi with my grandfather. That summer and the next I spent long hot days on the farm with my grandfather, doing a lot of things that at the time and in the moment I thought were unbearable. The summer heat was unbearable as my cousin and I stood with hoes looking at rows of cotton or corn that seemed to stretch to the end of the world; or we took in fields of newly bailed hay that seemed to fill up the horizon. Days of rain would bring a reprieve from work with a trip to town to a sale barn, or a trip to a catfish pond. In the middle of all of this was a couple of young bewildering boys following around their grandfather with wonder in their eyes.  My grandmother would always greet us with piles of fresh vegetables, fresh bread and sweet tea that tasted like ambrosia after being outside all day. After supper we would follow my grandfather out in the dark to check on livestock and feed his hunting dogs. Looking back now, we were not that much help, though over time and tutelage competencies increased and more and more often we would be left for longer stretches of time to finish a task.

 

At age twelve, my father told me one day that we were going to start roofing houses after he got home from work. For three summers we worked like this and always the same thing happened: I just basically followed my father around as he scooted over the roof with shingles in hand and me with a nail gun hammering them into place. I remember the first time he left me on a roof and didn’t come back when he told me he would. When he came back, I had covered the whole side of a house, including intricate work in cutting around a couple of vent pipes. I could have wept when my dad stood in shock and told me he didn’t know I knew how to do that. Again, I had just followed him around for three years on a roof, watching and imitating what he did.

 

When I was fifteen, my uncle completed my training in the world of work. He was a roofing contractor and he put me on a roof with a guy named Henri. Henri was about forty and looked to be sixty. He had had a hard life, he was broken by sorrow and like a lot of roofers he was a drifter. I suppose I was a bright spot in his broken life because he allowed me to follow him around on any and every roof and with patience filled in all the gaps of my roofing education. By the end of the summer he treated me not like an apprentice but a peer. The next summer I was running my uncle’s roofing crews.

 

Looking back on most of the things where I have skill or competencies, most of these came to me not from classes but from the active engagement of following someone around. I don’t remember a lot of lectures or classes but I do remember a lot of conversations, demonstrations, and concrete exhibitions. Not much abstraction or theory, just real knowledge: demonstrated by someone, then that someone observing me, and then they disappeared to do something else.

 

Most real knowledge in life is like this. A nurse told my daughter who is going into nursing school in the fall, “It really doesn’t matter which school you go to, all you are going to learn is ‘how not to kill someone, you will learn how to be a nurse on the floor.’” Which translated means: you will follow someone around who will demonstrate, then observe you, then turn you loose. I suppose that is why in the Bible when talking about and describing the Christian life, in simplest terms it is “following Jesus.”

 

Following Jesus is not the same thing as going to a class to learn about Jesus, though you need to do that. Knowledge is power, but it is not enough. Following Jesus is where you really learn about Jesus, experience Jesus, and really begin to marvel at his life, love and sacrifice for you. Following Jesus implies something concrete, something real, tangible and solid. If you follow Jesus and if you are a Christian this means you go to the kind of places he goes, meet and befriend the kind of people he befriended, live the kind of life he lives, which is one of sacrifice and service to others.

 

I think there is a myth in Christianity, which exist in parenting boys. Many people think you have to let boys get strong so they can do hard work. That is a myth; the truth is what my forebears knew: you get boys to do hard work so they can be strong. In Christianity, the same is true. You don’t go to classes so you can do ministry, rather you give yourself to ministry and then what you find out is you might then need some classes or more information so you do ministry better. But it all starts with engagement in something outside yourself; service where you give yourself away to some ministry project, some class of wild children, or group of people who you are called to serve for Jesus’ sake. None of us will learn the virtue of serving Jesus in an armchair, at some point you actually have to follow Jesus into the same kind of ministry he did.

 

The thing that made the long hot summers of my youth seem golden now is not all the hard, hot, messy work, though there is glory and satisfaction in knowing you can do things; but it was the figure of my grandfather, gazing upon two young boys with his approval. Following Jesus is like that, as messy and hard as ministry is: to know you participate in what Jesus is doing in the world and his eye of approval is on you as his child; and that is glory.