blog: a message set to sail as like a note tucked safely in a bottle.
One of the questions I pondered this week was when
I turned my life over to Jesus Christ.
That takes me back to the evening when five year old me
was watching my bath water swirl away. I had pulled the chain of the white rubber drain stopper, and the force of the water rushing from the tub through the small opening was mesmerizing. Until the gloomy thought clouded over my tiny brain
that someday my parents would surely die--disappear--like this water.
And who would take care of me then?
I ran dripping wet to their bedroom where bespeckled Mom and Dad were propped up on pillows, tucked into the covers, with their hardback books and little reading lights hooked over the headboard. And I wailed about how far away was the Holy Land and how would I ever get there to see where Jesus lived? After all, a plane was an oddity and cause for me to run out of the house flapping my arms above my head to get the pilot's attention. How could I behave long enough in a plane to get to Galilee? (Weren't my parents aware I could drown, left alone in the bathtub?)
Flash forward three worldly wise years. Now I'm eight and have wiggled through a few hundred sermons and far fewer Sunday School classes. (I recently found out that my early childhood church is called by some, a no-class church. go figure)
One Sunday afternoon, my family is eating dinner--that's what the noon meal was called after church. It was always a table full and well attended. And I get a big lump in my throat and can't swallow a thing. And I jump up crying like crazy and blurt out, I just know I'm going to hell! and run to my mother, who only God knows what she was thinking. Later that week we huddled with the red faced preacher in his office, surviving his interrogation. ( In all fairness, I think his complexion was perennially blushed due to his blond hair and blue eyes.) I must have been pretty convinced of my impending doom, because the date was set for my baptism two Sundays later on my 9th birthday.
Now some--probably church folk with class--would argue that I was saved already at Sunday dinner, almost choking to death on a fried chicken bone before I confessed and even publicly in the nick of time.
As solemn as a newly nine year old can be, I was allowed to squeak my confession before a mixed audience; then, swaddled into a white cotton gown, I was lowered into the bone coldest water, breaking the thin ice of lint that had settled on the surface. The congregation sang Trust and Obey.
That night, as I walked into a hallway, the wretched place in my house where the boogey man hid out to snatch me, I suddenly felt a new confidence delivered with a breeze of air, as if from a hand held fan like the colorful ones supplied in the church pews advertising the funeral home on giant popsicle sticks--or tongue depressors, depending on your point of view. At that moment, in the dark, I wasn't afraid for the first time ever. I knew that Jesus would take care of me, no matter what. He has, he does, and he will.
