The Baptism

The fog surrounds me like a heavy blanket.  I can’t see my feet below me, much less the steps ahead.  I stumble through the grey darkness with tears snaking down my face and a mumbled prayer escaping my lips: “God have mercy.”

And all the while the water steadily rises.

I can hear her crying, the sound of her weeping permeating to my very core, but I can’t find her through the fog.  I call out to her but she won’t trust what she cannot see.  I rush wildly about, hoping that I’ll stumble into her by chance and manage to pull her to safety.

But the more I rush, the more exhausted I become, and the more she too becomes frightened.  And she panics.

I hear desperate splashing.  Cries of fear.  The river.

And then only silence.

Desperate silence.

And then a blinding light breaks through the fog, forcing me to my knees in the rising waters.  Help is here.  As my rescuers pull me to my feet, I see others diving into the river after the one I had lost.  They emerge with her, saving her where I could not.

And I weep.  Weep for my striving, weep for my loss, weep for the salvation that arrived when it mattered most.  Weep for the fog and for the water, for the pain of this baptism.  Weep for joy.

We were lost, and then we were found.