View From the Pool

My "job" is roughly the best one on planet earth.  One of the things I get to do is baptize people. Yesterday I got to hang out in a pool, work on my farmer's tan, and dunk people under the water. And this is called "ministry".

It is a good gig. 

As I was in the pool yesterday, under the best-blue sky and partial cloud-cover that makes me sure as anything that there is a heaven and that it pierces through into this place, I was listening to adventures in missing the point. Tales of desperation. People who were burnt-out, burnt-down, and living in various circles of hell before awakening to life and hope and peace in Jesus. And a cloud passed over me.  

I have to say goodbye to this motley crew of renegades in less than two months. I have to say see-you-soon to people I have prayed with, shed tears over, wrestled with, and dunked in the water. That cold, clear, water.

I remember each baptism with striking clarity, and every body of water. Pools, warm and cold...mountain streams, cold enough to numb extremities and take your breath away...even a burlap-decorated kiddy pool.  

Every time they come up sputtering, every time they come up alive.  

We tell people that baptism symbolizes death, and I like to remind people that if I didn't bring them up out of the water, they would die. We see in baptism the death and resurrection of Jesus. We hope people feel the weight of this imagery as they follow Christ in baptism, that the joy could be all the heavier.

That journey of death and resurrection with Jesus is one that upends us regularly (even daily if we allow). It provokes us as we pick up our respective crosses and follow Him on the journey of love and sacrifice that He walked before us. The water doesn't wash away the struggle; it is not magic...there is a real road ahead of us when we come up sputtering. I know this because I have lived this, and I know the stories of those I plunge into the water.  

I remembered my own baptism as I stood shivering in the pool and the journey of the last couple decades, that journey that is now taking me back to the place I was born, on an adventure in building God's kingdom as we love God and people in Sioux City.     

I see God building a family across state, national, racial, and economic lines.  

The view from the pool is scary.  

The view from the pool is exciting. 

I get to see the love and mercy of God grow in people, and I can't wait to see it grow in Siouxland.  

I love dunking people.