So Proud of Them!

Two of my cluster girls were baptized this afternoon – as were two of my neighbors.

I spent several hours in the sun that, for today at least, remembered what May in Tri-Town is supposed to look like, and watched baptisms, sitting on warm pavement, being sat on, leaned into and lain on by my neighbor kids and a fourth grader who I have known since she was born, with a potentially new cluster girl using my knee as a pillow.

It was good and right and beautiful.

The faces were more colorful than most Bethel gatherings, and no one seemed to mind the unplanned reminders that cropped up every five minutes or so that we were all family. There were grandparents with walkers and oxygen tanks, and there were kids small enough to not realize they shouldn't drop cookies into the pool – and kids just old enough to wonder why the cookie was getting baptized.

There was food and laughter and the type of connection that doesn't always happen in a church that, on Easter Sunday, hit almost 5,000 in all-there-on-the-same-day attendance.

I've been at the same church since back in the days when it was only a couple hundred people and everyone knew everyone. Now, you meet “new” faces who have been going to the church for five years. Either way, I love this church because I love these people, and I love the fact that, when you get right down to it, we all know that we're family. A ridiculously huge family, but a family nonetheless.