Last week, a dear friend of mine made the decision to be baptized. This decision was not come upon hastily, nor did it come without a barrage of questions and an uncomfortable look at her heart. You see, she grew up the child of a pastor in a loving home and came to Christ at the age of nine, at which time she was baptized. Years later feeling the knock of God on her heart she started to feel a prompting to be baptized but it simply didn't make since to her she had already been baptized. It wasn't as if she believed that her baptism as a child was illegitimate or anything of that sort. She couldn't figure out what the feeling was all about and the knocking and prodding at her heart wouldn't cease no matter how much she researched the matter and no matter how much she prayed about it. After months of wrestling she came to the conclusion that God wanted more from her. He wanted ALL of her. He wanted her to humbly submit to His will no matter how what the cost. And so, she was baptized again, simply because God wanted her to.
I write about this because being witness to it has been a special thing for me. There is nothing more beautiful and more convicting than watching God work so intimately in the life of someone you love. Watching this story unfold has caused me to closely examine my walk with Christ on not only a deeper level, but from a different angle. Flipping the autopilot switch with regards to life has sadly become a commonplace among Americans these days, even with devout well-meaning Christians. Have you ever left your house to drive somewhere and found yourself arriving at your destination only to realize you don't consciously remember ANY of your journey from point A to point B? Scary, right? Today we have people who will make our coffee (thanks Starbucks), our meals (whether it be from a restaurant or pre-made grocery meals), buses to take our children to school, maid services, lawn services, you name it we can make a call someone and have it done for us. Life in our country has changed so much in just 50 short years. Wives used to stay home to raise the children, families sat down together at night to a home cooked meal together and (gasp) they talked about the events of their day. Family life revolved around the home and, for many, church. But today we are becoming increasingly "too busy" to live. Go ahead, google it and you will discover that Americans find themselves too busy to eat lunch, to take vacations, to vote, get adequate sleep, and our children are too busy for Sunday school (seriously? Our children's calendars are too booked for God, it's appalling). It has become easy to float through life without thinking about important things because we are "too busy".
Taking all of this into account, I am determined not to live my life on autopilot. God created us as living, breathing, feeling beings and that is how I want to live. Doing so will require sacrifice and pain, but the reward in the end is not measurable by human standards. If witnessing the work of God in a friend is such a thing of beauty, imagine what it would be like to be acutely aware of the work God is doing in your own life. I need God to break down any walls I have built and bring me to a place of complete surrender where I rely on Him alone. A place so close to Him that I can hear His whisper in my heart. I want to submit to Him wholly and trust Him with every area of my life, not just the comfortable ones. I want God to direct my path and I want to be coherent as I travel it, knowing that even when the path becomes rocky and curves in a direction I am not so comfortable with I can walk on in peace with confidence that the work He is doing in my life has beauty beyond what I can fathom in my humanness.
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