Bekah's Baptism: Throwing Stones

I decided on the stone theme I told you about yesterday way back in January. But in May, God added an element to it.

It was in mid-May that I found myself wrestling with some significant inner turmoil. A couple of weeks earlier I had stumbled through the one year anniversary of the beginning of Isaac's wilderness and it brought back waves of pain that almost drowned my heart. I'd questioned so much about myself and why I hadn't been enough to keep him...on and on it went.

That was also the time frame when I'd been called in for my first interview at WBCL and not many people knew about that. I had no idea what God was stirring up in my life, or if I was about to make a major life move...guess we now know the answer to THAT!

Anyway, one afternoon I was sitting out at the athletic fields at IWU, overlooking the ponds (one of my favorite places to pray during my lunch hour when I worked there), and God impressed this on my heart.

He reminded me I had about two months until my baptism, and He wanted me to spend that time working through the issues that commonly plagued me. Unpack them, figure out why they kept coming back, pray about them, be ready to let go of them.

And then, before the baptism, I was to write each issue on a stone and before I actually got baptized, I was to throw those stones in the pond and be done with them. Leave them there. Never go back for them.
These were my stones. For the sake of my privacy, I turned them over so you can't see what the specific issues were, but I do have words on the flip side of each stone.


I tried to explain out loud to everyone there what God has asked of me with these stones, but alas, I had a meltdown complete with hand waves that looked like something you'd see at the Miss America Pageant, so I just stomped my foot and said, "WORLD PEACE!!" Everyone laughed. (Several told me later they were crying pretty hard at that moment themselves and the laugh was welcomed.)

So instead I directed them to read about the stone adventure in the booklets I gave them (because I feared something like this would happen) and we moved on to the next item of business.
This became one of my favorite moments of the entire baptism. Brian turned aside and talked to me about the assignment and then he prayed privately with me: I will normally blog just about anything, but that's all I'm going to say about that part. That was a sacred moment between God, Brian, and me.
Then Brian asked everyone there to pray for me while I walked on into the water and had a moment with my God.

It was at this moment that the enormity of what I was doing really hit me. That was a long walk into the water.

Brian prayed out loud while I threw stones. I chucked them hard and loved hearing them plop into the water and sink to the bottom. They're gone and I can't get them back.

Love it. And yes. I throw like a girl.

He was still praying when I finished, so I stood in the water and listened and prayed. And tried not to fall over. (NERVOUS!!)

And that's one time I think God's okay with throwing stones.

I thought that was going to be the end of the stone part, but God had the most beautiful hidden surprise for me. My mentor, Lara, and her husband were in the crowd that day (you'll meet her in tomorrow's post) and after the baptism, when they came to my house, she handed me a gift bag.

Inside was a little Vera Bradley pouch filled with these stones:
Do you see the words written on them? She looked at me as I read over the stones and said to me, "You need new stones to replace the ones you threw."

She had no idea that about a month ago, when Jamie came down to spend the night with me, we prayed through each stronghold I'd written on a stone and Jamie told me specifically "Now we need to pray for God to replace these things with things of HIM. And much of what we asked for was what Lara wrote on the new stones - and she had no idea.

That's God, my friends. Lara didn't know ahead of time about the stone tossing. On the way to my house from the baptism, she and Mike got the idea to give me replacements, so they made a detour to a bookstore to get the stones. And she had no idea about Jamie's prayer. Isn't that so God??