My Baptism

My Baptism

 

I was baptized when I was 12 years old in a Methodist church in Elida Ohio.  The meaning of this act was lost on me at the time.  It was just part of what we as kids did in our church at 12 years old.  It was a right of passage.  It was words and actions to further the growing-up stage of life.   I do not think I felt any different after my baptism then I did before.  I was still the same kid in the mirror with the same anxieties of the day before.  I did not even think about how I would change over the years. 

 

Now at 69 I look at my baptism quite differently.  I am dedicated to the effects of my baptism.  Being touched by the waters of baptism has created slow ongoing waves of a tsunami that has changed me in ways that I could never imagine as that 12-year-old standing in a line of other 12-year-olds so many years ago.

 

I float in the waters of my baptism.  I have been sucked to the bottom of the sea, rubbed raw by the sand and stones at the bottom and thrown up onto the shore far inland.  I have been unable to see the water at times although I heard the waves hitting in my head and dreamed at night of warm water touching me on my legs and feet as I walked the shore line.

 

I know from deep inside I will not drown from the waters of my baptism.  Sometimes, though, I am lonely, as if I am a leaf floating by myself in the ocean of my baptism.  I am at the whims of the breeze that blows constantly.  It is the wind of the Holy Spirit.  There is nowhere to hide from the wind of the Holy Spirit in the ocean of my baptism.

 

I am committed to the love of Christ more and more each day.  I can swim, dive, wash myself on a daily basis in my baptism and it will never be the same.  I hold all the years of my baptism in the foundation of where I stand today in my commitment to the eternal love of Christ. 

 

I am daily committed to being the hands, the mouth and the heart of Christ.  I do not make it most of the time.  I go to sleep at night thinking I could have done better that day.  But then I wake up in the morning in grace knowing I have been baptized and my job for the day is to use myself for Christ.  I taste excitement and leap out of bed.   I have a job to do.

 

Sharen  Eninger