Baptized in barbecueland

There are two uses for a big silver tub in Kansas: feeding cows that will eventually become barbecue, and baptizing people.

I was standing in one, about to be baptized, reading my story to a room full of people I didn’t know a year and a half before, wondering if my best friend Sam would make it in time. Sam was part of a church plant across town and was going to try after they packed their whole church up from the school auditorium where they met.

When I arrived, Sam was the first person to ask me to hang out. I was in a city 750 miles from my closest relatives. I didn’t just need friends; I needed family. And where do you find family when you’ve moved away from your family? Church or social sports teams, and I hated kickball.

I’m from East Tennessee and have done the “mega-church” vibe my whole life. Our church went through an end times phase like everyone else in the 90s. We had rock guitars and the words on a screen, and we immersed people for baptism. I was in the denomination where you can say damn (with a little judgment) and get baptized as many times as you want (with no judgment).

I’ve only been baptized twice and I think I’m down now. And I said “Well, I’ll be damned” once but Calvinism is the topsoil of every church I’ve been to and joking about damnation is a little too on the nose for those of us working out our salvation with fear and trembling.

We preferred baptism to come after a confession of faith be it an altar call, raising your hand in a room with every head bowed and every eye closed, or after asking Jesus to come live in your heart like you had a little apartment in there with a mattress on the floor and you and him could get to work on fixing up the place.

I was first baptized at 10 and the only thing I remember about it was the guy who went before me made a joke about changing clothes in Pastor Tom’s office and getting the floor wet. I had nothing funny to say. I just held my nose and hoped the water was warm and I didn’t pee. (It was. I didn’t.)

Christian faith was what you did in my house growing up: I went to youth group every week, I played in the worship band, and I went to summer camps where you swung on ropes courses in the day and heard about Jesus at night.

So when I was 19, and I went from a house where faith was what you did to a dorm where I could do whatever I wanted, I didn’t realize my faith would become a question: I assumed God was real, everyone believed that, went to church, and grew up going to summer camps with ropes courses and Jesus.

But my first class was Anthropology 101, where I was told by a professor that faith was a social construct people had made up to give their meaningless adventures looking for food and sex some sense of purpose.

In the winter term of my first semester, I remember watching The Notebook because the girl I was talking to liked it. I finished the movie, sitting at the little desk in a cloth chair and I thought: “Is love real?” That whole movie seems to prop up something that seems real enough because we feel it and hope it’s like that, but is it? I mean, you can’t poke it with a stick, you can’t pull it out of a person and hold it up to the light to see what color it was — how did I know it was really in there?

It shook me.

It was 2011 — Richard Dawkins was a rock star, and I was seeing books like God is Not Great and The God Delusion on bookshelves at the campus bookstore.

I don’t think I ever stopped believing in God, but I tend to try on ideas like sunglasses. You pop on a pair, look through them, look at yourself in them, realize you have the wrong face shape for tear drop aviators and try some Knockarounds. And the world through Godless lenses was low, gray clouds over a winterscape trees whose foliage had long since abandoned their branches, people walked beneath them on cement paths to nowhere, lone black shapes with collars pulled up around their necks to ward off the cold. It was hard to get out of bed in the following months.

It was my first encounter with a truth you couldn’t prove like a math problem. These were the truths you couldn’t always feel your way toward. You had to actually climb out onto the branch, hoping it would hold you up when the trouble comes.

And so much of that depended on believing that God liked me. I was struggling to believe he was even there, let alone that he loved me.

Faith was like driving on a gravel road to the top of a bald mountain with an overlook: the road twists, turns, dives through dark forests and there are so many uncertain moments. “Am I going the right way? Am I going up or down the hill now? Is that guy in the F-350 going to murder me?” But now and then, the trees would open and I’d see a prefigurement of the view waiting for me at the top, where the trees opened up to a pasture nestled in the highlands of God.

I read a book that said I needed to learn to see God looking at me the way a mom looks at her newborn, like I was that safe with him, that loved. But I couldn’t feel it.

I lived like this for years, even after I moved to Kansas City. I went to a Christian Church out there. I moved to an apartment nearby, and they had a coffee shop, so I figured young people must go there, so I went.

A year and a half later, in December, this church was my home — they treated church like a big table and wanted everyone that came through the doors to know they had a seat whenever they wanted it.

One Sunday, they made an announcement about a baptism class; I’d been thinking about it for a while. I didn’t love that the class was titled “Baptism: Splash!” but I don’t remember anything in the Nicene Creed that said you couldn’t call it that, so I went.

Brian led the class — he was the first and only pastor I’ve ever had who asked me to play golf with him.

“You should do it,” he said, a smile cracking his face.

“You’re right, in a couple months?” I replied, putting it off as long as I could.

“January.”

“That’s in 3 weeks.”

“Why wait?”

That’s why I was standing in a tub that could feed cattle, reading my story to a room full of people who hadn’t known me from Adam a year and a half ago.

But then, I saw Josh who invited me to go to see movies on Fridays; I spent a lot of Friday nights alone before Josh and I became friends. I saw Jeremy, who showed me sushi places and asked me how life was going. I saw Dan, who watched the Cubs win the World Series with me. I saw Don, who invited me and Dan over to play basketball in his driveway and have dinner on his patio. I saw Jake, who’d moved out here with me from Tennessee. Dave was on stage strumming his guitar with a big smile above his soul patch. I saw Corey, who’d lived with me while he figured some things out with his life. I saw Jeff and Michelle, who let me live with them while I figured some things out with my life.

And Russel standing beside me, ready to baptize me. Brian was with a team in Poland and watching on a livestream.

I finished my story knowing I was amongst friends who had become family, a people who were not my people had become my people — which to my understanding, is one of the mysterious things that happens to a person once he goes down into the water, is washed, and comes out.

The water was warm. I didn’t pee, and when I came up, I looked in the back of the room, and there was Sam.

After I toweled off, Josh, Sam, Jake and Dan met me in the side hallway of the auditorium and we prayed together. I don’t even know what for, or what they said, but water dripped off me like amniotic fluid. I was shivering from the cold, the awe, the joy, and the love.

Love, there, out in the open — well, I’ll be … actually, never mind.