So finally after
a month of no blogs, I can hopefully release a few stories for you from
Israel. We will be traveling the
next couple of days and then headed to Swaziland, so no promises on the
internet, but I will hopefully share a few stories in the upcoming days.
Where to
start? I think the first story I
want to share with you first is one of the most exciting personal stories from
the race so far. A few days ago a
group of us had to drive to Tel Aviv to confirm bus tickets to Cairo and an
interesting conversation about baptism ensued. I can’t tell all the stories because they’re not mine to
tell, but I will just tell you my account…
I was baptized
when I was young, but to say that I was saved when I was baptized was a
stretch. I think I really just
wanted to do it because I saw my brother go through with it and I wanted to get
in the water too. Over the last 6
years or so, I have been involved with ministry of some sort, so the concept of
baptism got farther and farther away from my thoughts. That was until the last year or so when
it started coming back to my mind.
My home church
does baptisms in a pool at one of our member’s houses and the last couple of
times I felt an uncomfortable stirring when our lead pastor called out at the
end for anyone else that wanted to make their public profession of faith. This all came to a head at the last one
I attended where I actually baptized one of my students and the inward debate
came about as to whether or not I could turn to my pastor and say, “Yea, I need
to do this too.”
As the race
began, this idea slipped back out of my thoughts until a few months in, a
couple of my teammates started talking about how they had never been
baptized. I never spoke up and no
one really ever asked me my thoughts but I knew God was calling me out. So I started studying through the
Gospels hard that month and couldn’t get past the idea of Jesus’ baptism. If baptism is our first act as a public
profession of faith, then why was Jesus so late? And if ministry doesn’t really start until this point, then
what do you call what he had been doing all those years earlier?
Reading through
this got me thinking about what I’ve been doing the past few years and what
would happen if God unleashed my ministry from this point? So I went on the trip to Tel Aviv
knowing that we were headed to the Jordan River on the way home. I didn’t really bring up my story for a
while, but just waited for God’s timing.
I tried everything to back out again, but I couldn’t. So on October 27, 2009, I was baptized
in the Jordan River and it was one of the most exciting days of my life. Here is my video in case you want to
see the full story.
