Three Souls added to the Church // June 21, 2008

Today was a long, wonderful, exciting, exhausting day. The most important thing that took place today was the baptism of three souls marking their identification with Christ. It is my favorite part of being a chaplain/minister - baptisms.

The irony of today was that this particular baptistry has been used by me before - it was sitting in front a different chapel then - there have been two chapels since that one - and now its behind the new chapel on Camp Striker, and I found myself yet again filling the tank on a bright morning.

There were some issues about this filling though. It was one of those bureaucratic things where no one took ownership of getting the water to get it filled. The end result of alot of red tape was that at 0700 on the morning of the service, Ch Godfrey, (my BDE chaplain) PFC LePage (my assistant), SPC Tate (another assistant), and myself opening hundreds of 1-liter bottles of water and pouring them into the tank. I did in fact say "hundreds..."

Filling the Tank

So there we were, our hands and wrists had gotten so tired from twisting all those caps off that, I at least, had resorted to just stabbing and slicing the bottles like I was some kind of butcher. Everyone else followed suite after that. We had gotten the tank about 3/4 of the way full when the fellow in the picture walked up and (he didn't speak english very well) wondered what we were doing. He was driving the truck that brought water tot he porta-johns. I asked him if he had any friends with some clean water (the truck said "Blue Water, Non-Potable" on the side of it). He didn't really seem to understand so CH Godfrey tried.

(Motioning to a bottle of water he asked, "Clean water?" The fellow stared blankly.
"What's the word for water?" He asked the man, determined to get though.
The man looked at Ch G like he had a screw loose, "uh...water?"

We kinda gave up after that. The porta-jon water truck guy left and returned with his friend who spoke better english. Turns out, these guys were Muslims from Macedonia and were more than happy to fill our tank with clean water. Even though it was only the last quarter of a tank - it was a blessing from on high, two minutes did what would have taken us another half an hour...

That said, when we came back at 1000 for the actual service, the stillness of the water, the men gathered there prepared to plunge in and commit to a life with Christ. It was beautiful. It was sacred. It was holy.

Reading the opening Scripture

Into the water

Up out of the water

Post Baptism Prayer

Three new souls