As an old Lisp/Scheme guy all I can think whenever I try to figure out what is going on with Rebol/Red is "What a mess."
Scripting languages are much closer to Lisp than to C (e.g. compare Python to Racket).
IIRC Ruby, Javascript and Smalltalk (the latter inspiring a lot of OOP languages) were all explicitly designed to be like Lisp.
It should give you place to get started. The cliff node what I did is the I wrote a function that replaces things in a list of lists/a tree and used that rewrite the definition of the function to make it more readable. While it is an toy example I hope it helps.