I'll always love a good, fundamentalist/evangelical baptism. You gather at the beach, a river, a swimming pool and everyone sings hymns, listens to testimonies and after wards, eats good potluck.
There's nothing quite like a "good testimony." You know, the ones where people have been saved out of drugs, immorality or drinking Budweiser. I loved those kinds of testimonies. Darkness to light, death to life, blindness to sight.
I could listen to testimonies for hours. Except, sooner or later, one of the preachers would warn against "glorifying the deeds done in darkness" and so we never got to hear the really juicy stuff.
Still, I was always trying to figure out ways I could spice up my own testimony. The best I could come up with was that one time I told my sister to shut up. But Mom put the kibosh on that.
Sometimes the beach baptisms were a little awkward. For one thing, if the quiet little coves were crowded you were forced out onto the main beach with all the girls in bikinis (look away! look away!l) and tough guys with boom-boxes (cover your ears! cover your ears!) .
To make matters worse, the new convert was forced to shout his testimony above the sound of crashing waves. It was a little embarrassing watching the poor guy yell about how sinful he was, how the Lord had saved him from IMMORALITY! DRUNKENNESS! ROCK N' ROLL!
But then the new convert would wade out into the water and get dunked between incoming sets of waves and come staggering out, smiling. Re-birthed. Clean. A little disoriented. Everyone would burst into a raucous chorus of: O Victory in Jesus! and happiness shone from the faces of the newly baptized like the very smile of God.
Fun stuff always happened at public baptisms. Sometimes we'd get heckled–usually by angry, middle-aged women in voluminous tie-dyed T-shirts. But sometimes a random beach-goer would wander by, get all inspired by the singing, testimony-sharing and homemade potato salads. They'd get saved right then and there and splash out into the waves to get baptized.
You were so happy you could almost taste the love on your tongue. There was something spontaneous and giddy, open-hearted and ridiculously earnest at these baptisms. It was long before things started going wrong.
People were doing inexplicably irrational things–like throwing their whole selves at the feet of Jesus and vowing never to turn away from Him. It was like falling in love. Except instead of saying "I do" you said "Praise the Lord!" or "Hallelujah!"
All these years later I can still remember the sound of hymn-singing mixed with crashing waves and sitting on my little towel, contentedly eating grapes with my sister. We'd let the sun warm our shoulders and then we'd smile at each other.
There were a lot of scary, crazy things about my fundamentalist childhood. But baptisms were glorious.
Those were the times when I could feel the love of Jesus shining down on me just like that summer sun.
