Completing the cycle in baptism
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 4:03PM 
We baptized 13 people at Foothills Church on Valentine's Day, including Amanda Nichols, Justin Nichols, Grant Burns, Greg Busch, Craig Busch, Dustin Wright, Jason Christman, Sarah Orr, Alex Reece, Katie Cardwell, Lilly Green, Melissa Hermann and Ryele Bledsoe.
Here Katie Cardwell shares about her baptism experience:
This past Sunday I had the privilege of being baptized. I’ve been a believer since age five, yet I never got around to baptism. That’s in part because I am irrationally fearful of my head going under water, but after examining my heart these past few months I found it really boiled down to an issue of pride. Why did I need to get dunked in water publicly to affirm my faith? Sure, Jesus Christ himself was baptized and called us to do the same but it wasn’t really that important, was it? I didn’t need it, I didn’t want it and for the longest time I was not willing to be humble and obey.
With a lot of the changes I’ve been making in my life recently, the question of baptism came up again. I talked about it with wise mentors in my life with hopes they would tell me it was too late, I might as well not bother and that it was all right if I didn’t get baptized. Not surprisingly they rebuked that train of thought outright and I knew what needed to be done. I would need to let go of my pride and irrational fears and give God control. There were no more excuses because the importance of baptism was revealed to me –– and the truth has a way of sticking around once you know about it. There was no going back.
So I prayed long and hard to God. I still battled with Him about it. Looking back I see how silly I acted. My God who redeemed me, saved me and offered me love, compassion and eternal life was asking me to do this for Him and I was fighting it! Eventually I talked to Bart and got on the list to be baptized just after the first of the year. However, God had a different idea, and my sister who was to read my testimony ended up being out of town that weekend and things didn’t work out. I was crushed and confused, because if God was calling me to this why wasn’t he working everything out?
I realized during the January baptism service that God was calling me to first sit and listen. It was obvious to Him, and finally to me, that my heart wasn’t ready. I never imagined that preparing for baptism would be this difficult. But the more truth you know, the less you can ignore it, and I was ignoring where my heart was truly turned. Had I been baptized that day it wouldn’t have been for God, it would have been for me. That was wrong thinking. I’m glad it didn’t work out, because it gave me more time to think, more time to pray and more time to realize what this meant. That Sunday I listened to the testimonies of changed lives, I prayed, I pondered and I went home and wrote my testimony because it was then that I knew God thought I was ready.
I thought it was perfect when I learned the next baptisms were to be on Valentine’s Day. What could be a better representation of love than giving up everything for the God who saved me, all my pride and anxiety, in order to obey and make my faith public? So on Sunday, February 14, I showed up in cut-offs, flip-flops, and my Switchfoot t-shirt ready to get pushed under water in front of a room full of people. Talk about nerve wracking! My fears, however, were slowly beaten back as I made my way to my seat, being greeted, hugged and congratulated by my brothers and sisters in Christ. My family and friends were there to watch me in my obedience to Christ and I felt fantastic.
The baptism itself brought back all that anxiety I had been feeling as I sat in the pleasantly warm baptistry and listened as my words and testimony were spoken by my sister. I felt peace as those words engulfed me and the truth of God’s work in my life was spoken. There is no other word that could describe what I felt once my sister had fallen silent and Mark, a wonderful mentor to me, spoke his part. Peace and wholeness in Christ was all that I could think about, along with the thought of, “here it comes!” as I was pushed under the water and pulled back up in a perfect representation of Christ’s sacrifice for my life and the cleansing that took place there.
Of course there was the unpleasant, soaking wet scrambling out afterward, followed by changing in the bathroom, but none of that seemed to matter. In my heart, after coming out of that water, something seemed to click into place. A cycle was complete. God waited for me to be obedient to Him and His word, and a ritual I avoided for over a decade is now one of those shining memories of God’s work in my life.
Reader Comments (3)
yes, katie--you successfully made me cry! this is beautiful. thank you for sharing your behind the scenes journey toward obedience and how your heart responded---beautifully!
love you, kristen
You should write more for the blog on the foothills website. You are a great writer and I love the detail about the switchfoot t-shirt. I remember making a comment about how it was a great choice of t-shirt to be baptized in. Thanks for taking me back.
Katie does have another blog posting today and we hope she'll have more in the future. Thanks Katie for your work to make our blog more active.