If memory serves, I stood outdoors on a construction site and adjacent to a plastic green bathtub filled with holy water. It was regular water from a German faucet, but the water’s holiness derived from the baptism ritual about to take place, not the physical source itself. Those of us gathered—teachers at my Christian school, students, administrators—encircled the tub on the cement foundation of the newly expanding chapel location. See, my high-school was a school for missionary kids, tucked away in the Black Forest region, and I was about to be baptized. By the principal, no less. Sure, I had been baptized before as an infant, but this was, as the Anabaptists put it, my “second baptism.” A baptism of conviction and heart, in which my submersion in water matched my heart’s true desire to die and rise again in Christ. My faith would change dramatically over decades. Truth be told, those witnesses standing there on the fundamentalist spectrum of faith would call me a heretic today (and some have), but the earnestness of my intention, along with the promise and power of the sacrament lingers through both evolution and years.
The Sea of Glass
The Sea of Glass
The Sea of Glass
If memory serves, I stood outdoors on a construction site and adjacent to a plastic green bathtub filled with holy water. It was regular water from a German faucet, but the water’s holiness derived from the baptism ritual about to take place, not the physical source itself. Those of us gathered—teachers at my Christian school, students, administrators—encircled the tub on the cement foundation of the newly expanding chapel location. See, my high-school was a school for missionary kids, tucked away in the Black Forest region, and I was about to be baptized. By the principal, no less. Sure, I had been baptized before as an infant, but this was, as the Anabaptists put it, my “second baptism.” A baptism of conviction and heart, in which my submersion in water matched my heart’s true desire to die and rise again in Christ. My faith would change dramatically over decades. Truth be told, those witnesses standing there on the fundamentalist spectrum of faith would call me a heretic today (and some have), but the earnestness of my intention, along with the promise and power of the sacrament lingers through both evolution and years.