It's the next Tuesday after the Tuesday in which I said I'd be blogging quite a bit. It's also the last day of my vacation. So I'd better get busy.
____________________________

A few weeks ago, I believe it was on a Tuesday night, I went to bed around 9:45. It had been a long day and I had to open the store at 7:00 the next morning. If you don't know me very well, let me clue you in to a very important truth of my life-- I love sleep. I love knowing I get at least eight hours of sleep a night. I am constantly calculating what time I need to go to bed in order to get at least eight hours. I'm weird like that.

Tim calls me around 10:30, asks if I'm asleep, then says he wants me to wake up. He wants to invite me to something very special. I'm thinking possibly that he wanted to come over and drink or something, since he can't do that on campus. He told me to take a few minutes to wake up, then he'd call me back.

He called back and told me that Maik had decided that this was the night he wanted to be baptized, and that he wanted to know what I thought about it. My conservative, traditional side automatically kicked in, and I told him that I think big time things like baptism should be done within the context of a church community. So Tim said that he'd talk to him about that and get back with me.

As I was waiting, my mind went back to students at ETBU baptizing recently "saved" people in the Quad Fountain. I remember how, at the time, even though I was open to "outside the box" type shit like that, I really thought it was very pretentious to think that you can just baptize people wherever and whenever the hell you felt like it. I guess this just stems from my strong view of the importance of church. Church, not in the universal sense, but in the sense of being a community of faith in which people make a very deliberate decision to walk alongside each other for an extended period of time-- not just a group of Christian friends

Anyway, Tim calls me back about five minutes later and informs me that, even though they appreciate my opinion, they are going to go ahead and do it and would like me to be there. And so, of course I went. Even though I really felt that, for me, the time and place weren't real appropriate, I still appreciate other people's view and would definitely not pass up an opportunity to be a part of something so special.

I got to Tim's place. As we were waiting for other people to come over to figure out where we'd do this, Maik kind of walked me through his thinking. About how Tim had led him to Christ a few years before and how he'd been considering baptism for quite some time, and how he really appreciated my imput but how being in a building really wasn't that important to him (which showed a huge misunderstanding of the reasoning behind my view. I could care less about having a building either... it was more about the community aspect.)

Anyway, people came over, we went to the Baylor Marina, sang some worship songs that I had no clue how to sing, and Maik was baptized.

So, here's what was reinforced to me. Christianity isn't always nice and neat and pretty. Sometimes we have to be in places that are uncomfortable for us to really experience God in special moments. But, less you misunderstand me, that truth goes for all different types of people. Perhaps God wanted to stretch me to be in a place where I was uncomfortable-- a place that was not encumbered by all the trappings of institutional religion. But it's also true that maybe God wants to stretch the thinking of more progressive people by placing them in a place with more order and stability. We love to think of traditional people as being closed minded, but it's also true that progressive people are just as closed minded.

Despite all my misgivings, I was very glad I was able to be a part of such a special moment in the life of a new friend. My prayer is that Maik, in his continuing journey with Christ, will continue to experience God through all the joys and pains of this life-- and that we can all appreciate a God that sometimes is comfortable with a very messy reality that doesnt' always have our preconceived notion of what is good or right in mind.