Rebirth

Today I am being baptized in the Deschutes River.

Not in a building. In the river. Cold, moving, alive. I asked my church if we could do it there, and they said yes. So this afternoon it is just me and my pastors standing in the water. One baptism. I cannot fully explain why the river. It just felt right. I was called to it, and I stopped arguing with the call.

I told my family I was doing this. They asked why. You were already baptized as a baby. Why again.

Let me tell you why.

I was baptized Catholic as an infant. I spent most of my life Lutheran, and for the first stretch of it, into my mid-twenties, I was deep in that faith. Then I got away from church. I got away from the practice of it. I never stopped believing. I have always been a Christian. But I spent a long season not living like one, and a man can tell the difference between believing something and living inside it.

So this is not me rejecting what I was given. One of my pastors, Brant Himes, has two PhDs in theology and has spent twenty years studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the man who taught that grace is not cheap, that it costs you your life. Brant put it plainly. Getting baptized again as a man does not erase the faith I was given as a child. It confirms it. He told me I am not leaving what I came from, I am being sent from it into what comes next.

He also said the thing I keep returning to.

"Baptism is simple. It's this ancient symbol of putting your old life to death and imagining a new life in Christ."

Today my old life goes to death. A new one begins.

Here is what I did to get ready, and here is what undid me.

I prepared the only way I know how. I studied. Brant gave me Scripture to read and essays to work through, and I went at it like a student before an exam, because reasoning my way into things is what I do. Anyone who reads what I write knows it. I argue from evidence. The fine-tuning of the universe, the machinery inside a single cell, the structure underneath physics. I build the case and I trust it.

And the man with two doctorates, the scholar who would know, told me the thing I needed to hear. A faith resting only on argument is fragile. He laid it out as four parts that have to stay in balance, Scripture first, then experience, reason, and faith, and he warned me that reason is the one that turns dangerous when it grows past its place. Lean all your weight on the proof and the proof becomes the thing you worship, and proof was never strong enough to hold a soul.

That cut, because reason is the quadrant I over-trust.

Then my other pastor, Ben Fleming, gave me the word I will carry into the water.

"Baptism means I'm going to continue existing in the same world I have always lived in, but as a new person, with a new submission to God that I have not had before, able to exist inside all of these mysteries and unknowables."

He said the unanswerable questions do not go away, you just stop needing them answered before you will trust. You learn to exist inside the unknowns and still believe God sees you, knows you, and loves you. Not as a symbol. As a reality. Things are not the same after.

I cannot study my way to that. No one can.

This is the part the builder in me did not want to hear. There is no exam for this. There is no argument clean enough to carry me across. I prepared, and the preparation walked me right up to the edge of what reason can do, and then it stopped, because the next step is not a conclusion. It is a surrender.

I have spent my life learning to argue. I trust what I can prove. And the men who have walked with me told me the proof was never going to be enough, because it was never meant to carry this. There is a kind of knowing that closes a case. There is another kind that puts you in a cold river with no case left to make.

Jesus said it to men who were arguing about who was the greatest.

"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3 NIV)

A child does not have the argument. A child does not need it. He trusts the father and goes.

So today the man who built his life on truth and reason submits to something greater than his reason, greater than him, greater than everything he can measure or defend. I am holding the few things hard. Christ died. Christ rose. Christ is Lord. Scripture is true. That ground does not move. Everything past it I walk into with trust instead of certainty, because a man certain about everything has built a god small enough to fit inside his own head, and then spends his life defending it. I do not want that god. I want the real one. The one bigger than what I can prove. The one who stays God exactly where my understanding runs out.

I am going into the river with two things to do.

Declare it in public. Submit to the mystery.

The water is moving and I will not be able to hold it. I am going under still not knowing most of what I wish I knew. The old life goes under with me. The man who comes up does not have more answers.

He has fewer, and for the first time he is not afraid of that.

I want to thank the men standing in the river with me. Evan Earwicker, Ben Fleming, Brant Himes. Westside Church, Bend, Oregon. They have walked with me every week since I came back, and today they walk me into the Deschutes.

At two o'clock this afternoon, my old life dies. Every part of it. Every part of me. And a new man comes up out of the water. I believe that. I do not understand it. I do not know what the Holy Spirit will do in me, and I am not going to pretend I do. I am submitting to the mystery. To the feeling. To everything I cannot explain. I have accepted that I will not understand it.

That is the whole point.