The Second Time You Went Under

Marlene has been in the water twice, and she has never once told the story of the first time without immediately telling the story of the second.

She was seventeen the first time. It was a church her family had gone to since before she was born, and she remembers being cold and being happy and her cousin taking a photograph that came out blurred.

She was twenty-six the second time. That was a different church, a good one, one she was happy in, and a woman she loved and trusted sat with her over a table and explained, gently and with real care, why the first one had likely not been the real thing.

Marlene did not argue. She has never been much of an arguer. She thought about it for three weeks and then she said yes, and it was a lovely morning and people cried and she was glad she did it.

That was thirty-one years ago.

And here is what she has never said to a living soul, including the woman, who is gone now and was kind to the end.

She does not know which one He is looking at.

Not in a distressed way. Marlene is seventy-three and has buried a husband and raised four and she does not do distressed. It is more like a small ongoing arithmetic that runs underneath everything else. When she reads about the water she notices herself checking. When somebody in her family gets baptized she notices herself watching them and thinking, well, that is the one that counts for her, and then noticing that she thought it.

She has been keeping score between two mornings for thirty-one years.

You might have your own two. Or your own three. Somebody may have told you the first did not take, and you may have believed them, and you may have been right to. That is not the thing I am here about.

The thing I am here about is the arithmetic underneath, and the fact that you have been running it for a long time on your own.

I am not going to rank your two mornings

Let me be plain, because plain is the only way I know how to be, and because you have had enough people be careful with you about this.

I am not going to tell you which one was the real one.

I was not there for either. I do not know that woman and I would not speak against her, and I notice she sat down with you over a table rather than announcing anything from a platform, which tells me most of what I need to know about her. And I am not going to enter the argument about whether a person should ever go again, because sincere people have been on both sides of that for a very long time and you did not arrive here to be recruited.

So there is no test in this piece and you cannot fail it.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The written word hands out one baptism and no questionnaire with it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a settling in a woman who has been quietly grading herself since 1995.

What I am going to do is show you where the counting stops in the Scripture, because there is a sentence about it and it is short.

One offering, and the word is perfected

The letter to the Hebrews spends chapters on the problem of repetition. Sacrifices that had to be done again. A year, and then another year, and the doing again being itself the evidence that the thing was not finished.

And then it lands here.

For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.Hebrews 10:14

Count the words that are doing the work. One. Perfected. For ever.

Not improved. Not started. Not made likely. And the tense is the thing: it is done, past, complete, and the object of it is not the offering, it is people.

Now notice the direction. That verse is not asking how many times you have been in water. It is telling you how many times He was.

And the counting you have been doing was never yours to do. The word puts the number at one and puts it on His side of the ledger, and the Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to set down an arithmetic she has been running under everything else for thirty-one years.

And you were perfected rather than improved. The word says perfected for ever, which is a finished verb and not a process, and the Spirit is the one who makes a finished thing feel finished, which no amount of thinking it through on a porch has managed.

Both of those mornings were you turning toward Him

Here is the thing that I think has been hiding.

Marlene has been treating the two mornings as rivals. One of them is right and one of them is a mistake, and the arithmetic is trying to work out which.

But look at what was actually happening in each.

At seventeen, a girl who was cold and happy, going under because she wanted to belong to Him. At twenty-six, a woman who had thought about it for three weeks, going under because she wanted to belong to Him.

Those are not two competing claims. That is the same person doing the same thing twice.

And He was not absent from either of those mornings. The word says him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out, and it does not add a clause about arriving twice, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you were actually doing at seventeen and at twenty-six.

And nothing about you is pending His review. The word says he that hath begun a good work in you will perform it, and the Spirit supplies that confidence, which is not something a person talks themselves into over a bowl of beans.