giggling!!!

Yesterday I had the hilarious privilege of being the one in the water who lowered Sebastian in baptism.

Sebastian is 15. His story magnifies God’s grace – to and through individuals as well as to and through a “mutt” of a church like EFC.

Sebastian is from here (Quito). He goes to a school named after Charles Darwin…and that is where my giggling begins.

One of Sebastian’s teachers this year is Natalia. She, her husband and their daughter are from near Odessa in the Ukraine. What they’re doing in Quito will have to be another chapter in the book I will probably never write. Through an extra-sweet gift of God’s grace, they found their way to EFC and have been as involved in and out of this church as any family I can think of!

Natalia says she uses pretty much any opportunity she can in the classroom (at "Charles Darwin") to talk about The Living God. Along the way, God used that to catch Sebastian’s attention. He was even more intrigued to hear that Natalia attended an English-speaking church – because as it is for many his age, “English” is seen as a key piece to the future. Like many, he is reluctant to speak English – but by God’s grace, he seems to “get it.”

Apparently, at least he gets enough.

Two months ago, while kicking around some of the things he had been hearing and singing (with Natalia and a few “Christian friends [he] used to think were kinda weird”), Sebastian surrendered to Jesus, “The Way to The Living God.”

I hadn’t heard about it until a couple of Sundays ago. I also hadn’t heard that for several Sundays he had brought a change of clothes in his backpack, hoping/waiting for water in the “baptismal pool” so he could take the “next step” that his friends and his heart kept telling him about.

So, after having a blast getting to know a bit of his story and making sure “the pool” got filled on Saturday, this transplanted Canadian prairie guy lowered an Ecuadorian teen under the water…with smiling Ukranian faces in the front row, flanked by (as close as I could tell by a quick visual scan) a growing core of Ecuadorians, Nigerians, Haitians, Germans, Colombians, Mexicans, Canadians, Brits, Belgians, Filipinos, folks from at least two dozen of the United States – and even two Shamans from the Amazon jungle!


Sometimes you just gotta laugh with joy!!!