I've spent the past few hours packing and throwing junk away.

The house is quiet now with only the sound of a washer and dryer and the echoes of three and a half years of my life. Tomorrow is one of those calendar days. There's a move and a going away party and a baptism that has been nine months and many tears in the making.

In many ways I feel the past nine months has been a continuous baptism for me and my friends. The Christian practice of baptism is beautiful and sacred but filled with images and metaphors of pain, of death. I believe it to be more than just symbolic (although I'm not quite sure how much more,) but that doesn't take away from the fact that it IS symbolic. One second you are out of the water and that represents the old life, the next moment you are in the water and that represents death, then you are back out of the water and all your surroundings are the same yet you are somehow different on this side of the immersion than you were on the other.

Sometime tomorrow this computer will be disconnected from it's power source of several years and will be transported to another place. I will be transported as well.

Somehow I feel we are all preparing to come out of the water and be new; alive. But I don't know what that means and I'm not quite sure I want it as much as I should. Yet it will happen and I pray for the grace to bathe myself in it when it comes.

Not knowing the internet situation at the new place, it may be a while before I speak to you via this medium. I pray you find yourself on the other side of the water where there is life and hope and the knowledge that death has lost it's sting-- making it possible for us to go through our days without fearing it.

May Peace rain down from heaven...