round 1

I got baptized my freshman year of high school. Really the summer between eighth and ninth grade in Denver, Co. I remember it vividly. We (the youth group) had spent the day helping do housework for a family who had just lost their dad. He was relatively young, and I don't know if it was being around the effects of death all day long, and I got scared about my own mortality, or if it was the spirit moving in me, or more likely both, but the fear of God got in me and I wanted to get baptized right then. So I did, and everybody was happy.

And in that moment a new type of doubt was sown in me. My youth minister dipped me in the water and lifted me up, and I felt...like me, and I was almost disappointed. I don't know what I thought would happen while I was underwater, but I wanted to come up feeling different. I didn't though, and I was almost ashamed, like I didn't do something right, like I must have not done it for the right reason, or I must still have things to get right before I feel like a Christian.

I went through high school and college in this terrible tug of war with my own sinful nature. Trying to earn love, trying to be worthy of this calling. Gritting my teeth trying to not sin, trying to live right so I could feel the Spirit moving through me, so I could know that God loved me. It was exhausting, because I always failed.

The more I failed, the more I lost hope that I was worthy of the calling. The more I started faking it, and the more the secret doubt in my heart grew.

Here's what I'm beginning to realize. I was under the impression that when I was baptized, I was finished, I'd completed the journey. It's true that I was saved when I believed and was baptized, but my journey was just beginning. God set me on the road to discovery, but all I did for so long was stay put and feel sad that nothing was happening. Try to stay out of trouble, Go to chruch, do stuff with the church and secretly feel disappointed that I didn't feel God's spirit. That was the extent of my Christian walk.

As I've gotten older I've realized that my baptism wasn't the finale, but the opening act. I've realized that when you seek God, when you get in his word, when you try to live within the rythym of His commands, and when you accept His grace, He shows up in powerful ways.

I used to hear people say God wants me to do this, or God wants me to do that, and I would think, either they are liars or I am missing something. It turns out, I just wasn't listening.

This is such an elementary idea, one I've heard since I was in the nursery, but I promise the actual realization of this in my life was revolutionary: Seek and you shall find.