When my Dad met my Mom for the first time, he threw her straight into a lake without a single word.
Debbie Bailey came up sputtering mad. “You jerk!” she called him, among other things.
That is not what one would normally think of as the start of a beautiful relationship and a marriage that, this year, will stretch to 50 years.
Mom’s anger wasn’t so much over getting wet as the fact that she had no more dry clothes for the trip back.
Bob Lott didn’t see himself as a jerk. Far from it. For him, it was all in good fun.
The Baptist youth group that he was part of was having an outing at the lake. The rule was that everyone who attended the event had to go into the water — no exceptions.
In what amounted to light hazing, newbies who might or might not have been briefed on this rule got tossed into the drink. Mom hadn’t got the memo. She had already been thrown into the water multiple times that day. Dad rebaptized her.
He had arrived late to the lake party. Had he known that she had been tossed in already, he wouldn’t have done it, but I’m sure glad that he did toss her. It let her see something about his character.
Mom’s anger wasn’t so much over getting wet as the fact that she had no more dry clothes for the trip back. When Dad heard about this from her, at length, he of course felt bad.
Bob Lott being Bob Lott, he did something about it. He scrounged up enough clothes from his guy friends, most of them a size or three too big, to see her home that day.
Debbie was a newcomer to that church, Temple Baptist in Portland, Oregon. Bob had been there all his life. In fact, his mother was such a stickler for Sunday school attendance that he set a record and got to break ground on the new building.
Bob would eventually be a pastor there, making Debbie a pastor’s wife, and me and my brothers pastor’s kids.
The proposal is kind of a funny story. Bob talked for at least 20 minutes about traveling in the same direction, spiritual growth, and a common purpose.
“Wait, are you asking me to marry you?” Debbie finally asked. He was. She did.
Most Protestant ministers are not “fathers.” Baptists particularly avoid the label. But it was never a hard title for me to embrace, for obvious reasons.
They say more is caught than taught. For Dad and me it was more like 50/50. When he talked, I mostly listened. When I couldn’t quite understand something he had said, I asked Mom.
One thing I learned over many years is that Bob Lott is much, much smarter than he usually lets on. He’s one of the few ministers I know who also has a degree in economics, but not a lot of people know that.
In the main, for a ministry that stretched over roughly as many years as his marriage, he tried to keep things simple, didn’t use a lot of big words, and made lots of self-depreciating remarks aimed at his own intelligence. “Why is that?” I asked Mom.
She told me a story.
Dad was hired as a youth pastor at the same time as he was attending seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He was very excited about all the concepts that he learned in seminary and tried to convey these to his kids.
The youths simply didn’t track many of these high concepts that he was sharing with them. This was extremely frustrating to him, and he blamed himself. What to do?
He recast himself in a different role, as the down-to-Earth “Pastor Bob.” This was most effective in the dozen years he served as a youth pastor in at Central Baptist in Tacoma, Washington.
“Jesus died for your sins,” is a common refrain in most churches. Pastor Bob asked may of his students to really think about that for a minute. The “sins” part was important. He never denied it. But he asked them to consider the “you” part as well. “Jesus died for you.”
In some way that was not really possible to understand, that made you, yes you — you the sophomore who just missed the JV team, you the girl who got dumped by your boyfriend, you the kid who blew a test because your parents were yelling all night and you couldn’t sleep or focus and now there will be more yelling — into a being of incalculable worth.
“I want you to see yourself as God sees you,” he would challenge them, over and over again. In the Christian understanding, he said, you are loved by the creator of the universe and are literally someone worth dying for.
You don’t have to agree with the underlying metaphysics or theology of that statement to see why it could make a huge difference in the lives of struggling youths looking for direction. Many of them came from troubled families and were straining to make it through their high school years.
Pastor Bob, Dad, my father, offered these youths Hope, with a capital H. Many of them clung to that Hope during their formative years. I watched it make all the difference in the world — and perhaps in the world to come as well.
Jeremy Lott is author of the new children’s book Growlilocks and the Three Humans.
