This Time, I Mean It.

I made a spreadsheet last year to track my own healing. Color-coded tabs. A column for "scripture that hit different this week." I genuinely believed that if I could organize my relationship with God the way I organize everything else, I could finally get it right. Get Him right. Get myself right enough to deserve whatever peace I was chasing. God, I imagine, watched that spreadsheet get built with the same patient, slightly amused expression He's probably worn my entire life. The one that says, sweetheart, I love your effort, but that's not how this works.

This Saturday, I'm being baptized. And before you picture the tidy version of this story, a woman grows up in church, wanders a little, comes home in time for a nice bow at the end, I need to stop you right there. That is not what happened to me.

I didn't grow up in a church-every-Sunday, picket-fence kind of home. My childhood came with its own scars, the kind I write around more than I write directly about, even here. The only church I knew as a kid was the one I went to with my grandparents when I visited, sitting in a pew that felt like it belonged to someone else's life. I remember liking the singing, liking the quiet. But I also remember hearing about a good, loving God and then going home to a version of childhood that didn't look like that, and not being able to make those two things sit in the same room. Nobody had an answer for that little girl. I certainly didn't. So I filed it under things that don't make sense, and I moved on.

By the time I hit that awkward preteen stretch, my best friend invited me to a youth group, and I went for the snacks, the friend, and whatever cute boy happened to be within eyeline. It wasn't about Jesus for me. I sang the songs, did the icebreakers, and went home every week exactly the same person I'd been the week before.

Faith didn't really re-enter the picture until I was a young adult, and even then, it entered because of a relationship. I started dating someone whose family went to church, and church became part of the package. I learned the language fast, the way I've always learned languages fast when there's a relationship on the line. I could nod along to a sermon and drop a hearty amen at exactly the right moment without absorbing a single word of it. I talked the talk fluently. I did not walk the walk.

I actually got baptized during that season. Full dunk, the whole production. And I need to be honest about something I've never said out loud to many people. I don't think that baptism was real. Not because the water wasn't wet, but because my heart wasn't in it. I hadn't accepted anything. I was still sitting on a fence the whole time, going through motions that looked like faith while feeling almost nothing underneath. I came up out of that water mostly relieved it was over so I could go get waffles. I'd already done this once, technically. This Saturday is not a technicality.

Then adulthood happened, and it brought things I still don't fully know how to write about. I lived through trauma I'm not going to lay out in detail here, some of it isn't only my story to tell, and some of it I'm simply not ready to hand to the internet. What I will tell you is that in the middle of an assault I survived, something in me broke completely, and I swore, with total conviction, that there was no God. Not doubt. Not anger, though that came later too. In that moment I decided He simply didn't exist, because a God who was real and good could not possibly allow what was happening to me to happen. It felt less like a conclusion and more like a wall I built, brick by brick, to survive something I had no other way to survive.

After that, I stopped going to church. Stopped praying. Stopped looking for signs or hope or anything that resembled comfort in a God I'd already decided wasn't there to offer it. This wasn't a quiet drift like my youth group years. This was a door slammed shut, on purpose, and for a long time I had no interest in reopening it.

I ended up married to a man who had no faith of his own, which, looking back, made a certain kind of sense. Two people who'd both decided God either wasn't real or wasn't worth the effort, building a life with no room in it for the conversation. That marriage eventually ended, not because of faith or the lack of it, marriages end for a hundred complicated reasons, but the divorce turned out to be the strange, unexpected doorway back to everything else in this story.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I finally started surrendering, not to God yet, but to myself. I started dating myself, and I promise that's a real thing I did and not a metaphor. I went to movies alone. I went to dinner alone and ordered dessert without offering to share it, which if you know me, was practically a religious experience on its own. I traveled alone. I sat with myself in silence for the first time in years without reaching for a distraction, and it turns out I actually liked the company.

Out of that season came something I didn't expect. I started wanting to help other people walking through what I'd walked through. And then one day, a client of mine asked if I'd go to church with her. I almost said no out of habit. Church still lived in that locked room I'd shut years earlier. But something in me said yes, and I went, and I still can't fully explain what happened in me that day. Something opened. Not all at once. Just a door I thought I'd sealed for good, cracking half an inch.

Afterward, that client said something I don't think I'll ever forget. She said, I hope someday I can help people the way you have. I'm sorry you had to go through what you did, but I'm glad it led you to me. I stood there completely undone, because for years I'd only ever been able to see what happened to me as senseless, as proof there was no God, or that He wasn't paying attention. In that one sentence, I got handed a different possibility. Maybe I'd had to face what I faced not because God caused it, but because He could take even that and let it reach someone else. I didn't get a full theological answer that day. I got a reason to start wondering again.

After that, I found myself praying without deciding to. I started going to church on Sundays, just me and my kids, quietly, half expecting the feeling to fade like it always had before. It didn't. It grew.

Then came my husband. If you'd told me a few years earlier that I'd end up excited about Bible study on a weeknight, I would have laughed you out of the bar. He introduced me to his church, his Bible study, and taught me about the Sabbath, about rest as an actual command instead of a lazy afterthought. Something clicked in a way it never had before, not in my grandparents' pew, not in the youth group basement, not even the day I got dunked the first time. I started reading the Bible because I wanted to know what came next, not because I was supposed to. I started bringing things up at dinner, watching my kids ask their own questions, realizing faith had quietly become something we were building together instead of something I was faking alone.

Even now, the control hasn't fully let go of me. I still catch myself trying to manage my relationship with God the way I manage everything else. I still negotiate with Him sometimes, offering feedback on His own plans like I'm leaving a review. Google still occasionally moonlights as my second prayer life at eleven at night. I've made peace with the fact that faith was never going to erase that part of me. It was just going to keep meeting me in it.

I remember the actual moment I decided this Saturday was happening. It wasn't dramatic. I was on my patio  watching my kids chase each other around the yard with water toys. My husband was next to me, and I said, out of nowhere, I think I want to be baptized. Really this time. He didn't look surprised. He just took my hand and said, I think that sounds right.

So why baptism, and why now, and why again. I'm not doing it because someone pressured me into it, I already know what that version feels like. I'm not doing it because I've finally become good enough, or healed enough, to deserve the water. If that were the requirement, I'd still be out there building a spreadsheet, waiting for a finish line that was never actually there.

I'm doing it because something has already happened inside me, slowly, over these last several years, through the wandering and the anger and the door I slammed shut and the door that eventually cracked back open because a client I was trying to help ended up helping me instead. My heart finally caught up to my faith. This baptism isn't the beginning of my story with God. It's not even the beginning of my surrender. That started on a movie theater seat I bought a single ticket for, and in one sentence a client said to me that I've carried every day since. This is just the part where I stop keeping it private.

My family will be there Saturday. My husband, watching from the front row, probably pretending it's allergies. My kids, who've watched their mom go from praying alone to actually looking forward to church, who will remember, I hope, that their mom stood in front of people she loves and said, out loud, this is who I belong to now.

I think I'm going to come up out of that water and still be exactly the same messy, sarcastic, overthinking woman I am right now. I'll still have bills that need paying and a kid yelling about a missing sock in the next thirty seconds. I'll still have scars I don't show everyone. I'll come out of that water still, undeniably, a hot mess.

But this time, I'll actually mean it. I know exactly Who I'm walking with, and I know it because of the whole story, not in spite of it. The girl in my grandparents' pew wondering how a good God could allow bad things. The one at youth group who cared more about snacks than Scripture. The one who got baptized once and didn't mean it. The one who broke in the worst moment of her life and swore there was nothing. The one who slammed the door, and the one who eventually sat alone in a movie theater and, for the first time in years, felt like good company to herself. Every one of those women is walking into that water with me Saturday. None of them get left behind.

Hot mess, still blessed, and this time, all the way surrendered.