The Dichotomy of Us

By Fred Pruitt

“Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.”  (2 Cor 5:15).

A dictionary definition of “dichotomy.”

1. division into two parts, kinds, etc.; subdivision into halves or pairs.
2. division into two mutually exclusive, opposed, or contradictory groups.

John Bunting and I went on our first Christ-sharing trip together in late November/early December, 2000. The US Presential election had just been held and it was still in the courts as to who would be President, Al Gore or George W. Bush. It didn’t seem odd to me then, but looking back now I can see how odd it might have looked to others, this unlikely duo, one nearly a giant, the other half-so, riding around in a little car talking to any welcoming listeners about Jesus Christ and Life in union with God.

Our backgrounds could not have been more different. We were from different generations. We did not socialize in the same circles. John was a prominent and well-liked Louisville surgeon with a very successful practice. I was sort of a – nothing. I never had a “career,” unless we count what I do now as a career. I was an ex-hippie wannabe musician turned Jesus Freak writer/preacher who scraped to pay the rent and went from job to job for years. Some of those years were spent in “ministry,” and some were not.

It is also possible we were related because we both had grandparents whose names were Hicks, but that is a pretty common name. We didn’t make much of it.

John and I did not tour together by car again until the Fall of 2005. On that first trip in 2000, as soon as I sat down in the passenger seat of John’s car, I realized I was “trapped” in a little car on a two-week trip with a man I hardly knew. Therefore, that trip was more a “get-to-know-you” time than anything else. Over the years before we moved to Louisville, we (John and I) had gone to many of the same meetings. We had been together in groups umpteen times. Janis and I had been guests in the Buntings’ home on more than one occasion, but John and I really did not know each other at all.

And so, it started. One of the first things to come up, was how to handle who pays for what, especially for food. That was solved straight away, on our second food stop, I think. On the first stop, it was breakfast time, and John picked up the tab, though I offered. On our second stop for lunch, again the bill came, and John grabbed it. Again, I offered to pay.

There John stopped me and said with the utmost conviction, “I don’t want you to worry about it. I am going to pay for all the food and all the gas on the trip, so you don’t need to offer anymore.” That way of doing things persisted through all the years we toured together, from the Fall of 2005 until our last trip together to Florida and Alabama in the spring of 2017.

(He said that by faith. He did not have the money to do that anymore. When I got into his car, he had not been a practicing physician in 10 years. He had retired early from his practice in 1995, after hearing the Spirit’s call to go to Africa to testify and share with the Africans the liberating truth of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

There is much more to this story but for time’s sake I’ll cut to the chase. The John B I had first known in the 1980s was Mr. Moneybags, a “human ATM,” as he described himself to me regarding the bygone days of plenty. But those days were long past by the time he and I got together on a regular basis. John no longer had what seemed like “unlimited funds,” so it turned out we were both living “by faith” in that regard. And in that regard, the Lord always provided. Even though we were together on those trips, to me, every day also felt like, quoting Norman Grubb, that we were “on God alone, out where the cold human winds blow …”)

By the autumn of 2005, we had been together enough in Louisville that we were not such strangers to each other as we had been on that first trip. The fullness of time finally came, when I left my job with Ray and Marian Sandbek, and took my place in the front passenger seat in John’s VW Passat. The previous occupant of the seat had been Dan Stone, who had gone to glory. I filled Dan’s seat well enough. His shoes? Not so much!

We had a lot of comedy. On our first trip, in 2000, we arrived amid a pile of fresh of snow in the late morning at Jack and Alice Corcoran’s house in Simsbury, CT. There was no car in the driveway. Nothing stirred. It appeared that no one was home. We called the number we had for them and it rang and rang with no answer. Finally, we decided to go into town, have some coffee and return later. After an hour we were back, calling their number again, still with no answer.

Which, finally, necessitated a call to HQ to verify the number. While checking her files at HQ, Luli asks John if we have knocked on the door in all the while we have parked in their driveway. [How dare she, asking questions like that!] So, I get out of the car and walk up the stairs to the back entrance, and Alice flings open the door! They had been there the whole time! They didn’t look out. We didn’t knock on the door! (And the reason the phone rang and rang and never picked up, is because our itinerary document issued from HQ had a typo in their phone number.) A typical day.

However, comedy wasn’t just in the car. It was our specialty at the annual June Men’s Retreat in Los Angeles with Ed Lassiter and Skip Smith. The years I attended it was held at Ed’s home, high on a coastal mountain in Rancho Palos Verdes, about twenty miles south of the city. We could have a small book just on some of the shenanigans that went on at and around that conference.

I’ll just mention two incidents. One function John performed before the conference every time was to set out the plastic chairs and confirm their individual reliability. It was a practical visual demonstration of one way I often use to describe faith, which I learned from NPG. Faith is like selecting a chair when one comes into a room. The first thing to do is decide on the particular chair in which we desire to sit. We make an assumption – which is really an expression of faith – that the chair we select will hold us up. That is where the “leap of faith” comes in. It’s a leap into the unknown because we do not really know if the chair will hold us up. To complete the deal, we go to the chair we selected, turn around and let our bottom fall relaxedly into the upholding framework of the chair. Once having sat, we can lift our feet and KNOW we are being held! The chair holds us up, thus demonstrating NPG’s, “What you take takes you,” description of faith.

“Behold My servant, Whom I uphold; Mine elect, in Whom My soul delighteth; I have put my Spirit upon Him: He shall bring forth judgment to the Gentiles.”  (Isaiah 42:1).

This was Jesus’ Promise from the Father. Jesus knew, at least from His Baptism onward, that His whole earthly life He had been upheld by and empowered by the Life of Another within Him. We live the same way! It was Jesus’ one and only secret weapon, to live in the Father by the Holy Spirit, to know that He did nothing “of Himself,” but that the Father within Him did the works. That’s the same Life WE live today. It’s as simple as that. We can make the same claims to scripture that Jesus did, because HE opened the way for all of us to return from our wanderings and prodigality, to seek again the warm embrace of our Father we have longed for, and to find it by means of Jesus THE Christ, Who is in us as our Way, our Truth and our Life.

Which brings us back to John Bunting setting out chairs and making sure they were in tip-top shape. John proved the opposite that day! He demonstrated for all to see, what happens if we place our faith in a chair that is unable to hold us up. It’s like faith in a house of sand. The storms come and the house falls. Only in this case John was the storm and the house of sand was the poor chair lying in shambles on the patio. John was undaunted, however. Once he climbed out of the little crater that he and the law of gravity had created on the patio (KIDDING!!), he got right back to work.

I was the perpetrator of the second incident. The Lassiter’s home is a lovely ranch-style house that had three separate sliding glass doors with sliding screens, in three separate entrances. This happened just before I realized I needed more powerful vision help than just the reading glasses I had been using for several years.

Long story short, I managed to completely obliterate ALL THREE SLIDING SCREEN DOORS in the two days of the meeting. It was the same each time. I would approach the door opening that to me looked completely clear – like the glass and the screen were fully open. All three times, thinking I was about to walk through a doorway filled with nothing but air, instead I walked full-force into a previously invisible screen door, only to find myself tangled in mangled metal and ripped window screen. Apparently, I move through open doorways normally like an NFL Linebacker looking to sack the quarterback. (ALSO KIDDING)!!

But it wasn’t all fun. Or funny.

John also annoyed the hell out of me sometimes.

One thing – he was almost always in a hurry, even when you didn’t need to be. One time we were leaving a hotel room on the east coast of Florida to drive to the west coast of Florida to meet someone for lunch. (That’s not that far.) We were not late and had plenty of time to get there. John came in and grabbed my suitcase off the bed to take it to the car, which I was still packing and wasn’t zipped up yet. Of course,  everything spilled out of it. I got so flustered in packing everything back in I left out the new pajama pants I had bought just before the trip, leaving them there tangled in the bedsheets. I never took him to task about it but I couldn’t look at him for a couple of hours across Florida. It was my fault but it seemed good to blame him for a couple of hours.

I learned early-on I had to make-do with the hurry thing, though I learned to mitigate it in two ways. One, I became the natural passenger/navigator for maybe 97% of all our car rides. John was like a driving machine. He was like a camel in the desert. He just kept going and going and going. In all the years we rode together, I doubt I drove more than a couple hundred miles if that, except for one time when we had to drive two vehicles back to Kentucky from Bridgeport, Connecticut in one long long day.

I did help him watch his speed, though.

But on dry land where we walked, I just learned to walk slower than he did. I did it on purpose in order to slow him down. I knew he wouldn’t get too far ahead of me. John had this forward “lean” in his walk (a little like John Wayne), so his head was always a little farther along than his feet. I think that had something to do with the whole “hurry up, let’s go” thing. He was talking to his feet!

He had another annoying habit of not getting over to the exit lane on the Interstate until we were just about to the exit. Doing my duty as navigator I would tell him, “We’re exiting on the right at Exit 44 in two miles. ….. Ok, one mile. ….. Ok, half mile …. Ok 1000 feet …. JOHN GET OVER NOW!!!” … I think I get my point across.

I finally concluded that John had gotten along quite well driving without my help for the better part of 70 or so years … so I stopped sweating it. It was the same for any other attempts at behavior modification. We are not here to fix one another. We are here to love one another. Sometimes we may need or others might need a little fixin’, happens from time to time – but let it be the natural outflow of brotherly affection.

My viewpoint on those “foibles” I mentioned of John’s, (others I don’t mention, as well as my “foibles,” too, that John must’ve seen in me) changed, too. They were/are those special places where we love each other because we love our humanity as God loves it. All that “humanity-stuff” that John couldn’t help but show, is WHY I loved John, because those were the ways of God in Him, whether John Bunting or I knew it or not! They are part of what made John Bunting to BE John Bunting. All HIS foibles as well as all MY foibles are exactly what the Father intended from the depths of eternity, that those foibles would be riding around in a car together laughing and joking or being silent and taking in the scenery, conversing often or often hardly conversing, sharing intimacies in a word or two here or there. Just the steady, continuous outflow of life in limitless variety, all blessed by and in the Father.

Being with John Bunting showed me, among many things, that the tip-top thing above all things, is the love of the brethren, in whom we find no fault, and for whom we desire nothing but the lovingkindness of God the Holy Spirit in all and through all. Of course, we are not speaking of anything formal or programmatic. “Just as I am,” simple living.

There is also an expansion in our consciousness of who the brethren are. I see the “love of the brethren” like an upwardly moving and ever widening umbrella that increasingly sees everyone in its sight as someone to embrace within itself, not to consume them, but to bring them out to the forefront in the pinnacle of Who they really are, so that they may fully be seen to be, “what God hath wrought!”

One story I heard many times from John from his Africa days, was about an island in Lake Victoria where the inhabitants had never heard of Jesus. A local bishop in Kenya had told him about it. “Take me to it. I’ll swim there if I have to,” John replied.

It turned out to be a fraudulent story, meant to bring prestige to that local bishop by his ability to bring in a European (John), because Europeans often meant money. Even though the island story was false, the Spirit still used that fraudulent story to get John going on his way. Many works of the Spirit came out of that.

That was John Bunting. He didn’t care about doctrinal differences, political differences, or what race, line of work/income, gender or age one was. He seemed to mostly exist for those times of fellowship when the sharings and teachings were finished and people would be milling around wondering who to talk to, as one who could sit there a long time and listen to one person tell something of their story. (That’s not me!) He was like a heavy duty Bounty paper towel. You could sit there with him and pour out all your stuff right on the table, whatever it was, what you’ve been questioning, you’re about to lose your house, or what doesn’t seem to be working – whatever it is – and like the big Bounty in the commercial, all that “stuff” just gets sucked up in that big Bounty paper towel and dissipates before our eyes.

Anybody I can love I believe is capable of receiving the love of God. Who can I love? Anyone I choose to love! Those are my words but they are words that John confirmed in me by simply being them himself. I saw him over and over and over again love the unlovable and what is that but the Spirit of Christ Jesus?

Why did I quote the passage and the definitions above? Because this is exactly how we start seeing “with a single eye,” to quote Norman Grubb. We no longer see each other with only flesh eyes. We are seeing on a new level. The immediate foreground of appearances becomes less focused and ramshackle. It would all come apart into chaos except it is all held together in perfect cohesion in Him in Whom all things consist, where all things are obedient to Him and work His will only. There is no other.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  (Matt 5:8)

Enjoy this song — In My Life  — The Beatles