Sometimes life is completely random. Sometimes it's not. And one of the privileges about your one life, is sometimes you get to assign purpose when you see fit.
I fell in love with a boy. He made me go to church. We got married. And suddenly God was real. Is it a coincidence that I let down my walls and opened my heart to another person, and God happened to worm His way in as well? Maybe. But I think that my love story was two love stories unfolding simultaneously.
For about a year, I showed up at church on Sunday mornings and cried. I cried because of how far I'd fallen, how changed I was from the person I used to be. I cried for all the regrets of my life. I cried because I was realizing that God hadn't been sitting in judgment of me, but had in fact loved me since before I was even born.
There were new people in my life, and one of them in particular had a big influence on my life at this particular stage. Her name is Julie, and she might not even realize how profound her words were to me, how closely I was paying attention to everything she did and said. We talked about silly things and serious things, and she had recently gotten married, so of course I was interested in how all that worked. But most of all, Julie was in love with Jesus. It was so different from how I'd perceived the Christians of my childhood. There was no list to check off, no looming punishment for broken rules, no looking over the shoulder to see if anyone heard or saw.
We were talking about baptism one night. I was already coming to church, I was already realizing how much I wanted this relationship with God that I saw modeled on Sundays, but I couldn't shake the old feeling that baptism was something to get over with already. I told Julie that I just didn't think I needed to do it. She thought about that a second, then shrugged and said, "I guess I don't understand why you wouldn't want to do it."
You know when someone says a simple sentence, just one short thing and your entire worldview spins 180 degrees? This was one of those moments. I'd been so stuck thinking that baptism was about requirement and striving, and here was another way to see it: an offering. Voluntary. On my own terms. A decision made of free will.
I didn't have an answer for Julie, and her question repeated in my mind over several weeks. Why wouldn't you want to do it? Why wouldn't you want to do it? I couldn't think of a single reason to not do it, to delay taking that step forward with God, making a public declaration that I had fallen in love. It happened on a Sunday afternoon, in a lake not far from our church, just two short months after getting married, that I was baptized with my husband at my side.
Do I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He died on a cross and rose on the third day, and that in Him I have eternal life? Yes. Yes I do. And with that confession of faith, I went underwater and came back up.
That day, that ritual, remain fixed in my mind. My life is changed from how it was before, and my relationship with God has never wavered since I took that dunk. Is it a coincidence? Is it magic? Is it a holy mystery that may never be understood? I honestly don't know. But I believe that act and the faith it came out of were the start of something wonderful for me.
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