Perhaps your family was like mine and did puzzles during the Christmas holiday season. We got a thousand-piece puzzle, set up a card table, and dumped the puzzle pieces out and let the fun begin. Conversations started, and life shared as we searched for the image emerging from the chaos on the table. We would start by turning all the pieces over face up. I’ve always cheated by looking for the border pieces first. Straight sides were easier to spot than half a skater’s face. Then the work began, looking for the more recognizable portions of the image to assemble.
The Puzzle Pieces
However, we have left out one of the most critical puzzle pieces: the box top. Can you imagine doing the puzzle without it? There would be little joy or fun without an image! The box top puts everything in perspective, in context. It gives meaning and relationship to every piece. It enables the joy and fellowship of discovery as we scramble to find the rest of the skater’s face on the frozen pond. The friendly competition, excitement, and laughter come as we search for the missing pieces, and someone else beats us to them!
What if we started with no box top at all? The pieces just poured out of a brown paper bag. Or, even worse, what if it was the wrong box top? A winter scene, but not the one that fits the pieces you have? Perhaps one of the older folks in the group would say, “I know how that one goes together,” and goes on to describe it to you. For me, this illustrates much of the first half of my life. Life does not come with a box top! We don’t even start with all the pieces, but with plenty of folks out there telling us they know how it all fits together. There are great moments of joy when something resonates with us, and we collect another piece. Even more, when some of the disjointed pieces began to fit together.
My Story
Filling in a little more of my story may be helpful here to illustrate my point. My father was a Methodist, and my mother, a Baptist. And I was infant baptized into the Presbyterian church, go figure, and one called Trinity at that! Baptism has turned out to be a significant road map of my life’s journey. I would go on to spend my youth among the “frozen chosen.” Collecting perfect attendance pins along the way.
In our denomination, at the age of twelve, we would begin our confirmation process. We would memorize the Westminster Catechism and go before the elders and answer questions about its content. Much of the cause for my latter demise came from only memorizing the shorter one. My mother was weary after working with my two older brothers through the full one. They turned out great, Ha-ha, both ordained Presbyterian ministers, but then there was me! I walked the aisle and received a Bible with my name engraved in gold, and the deal was done, confirming my baptism at the age of consent!being
To say that there was not a connection here to the bullet list of doctrines I claimed to believe would be a gross understatement. I was told this god had chosen and elected me yet was unknown to me in any relational way. This god was Zeus, an old man with a white beard on a distant and grand throne of judgment. My best understanding of the Trinity was as water, liquid, steam, and ice. This Trinity was somehow of the same substance in different forms or something like that? This was a really unhelpful understanding as I moved into my teen years into alcohol, drugs, and sex. For me, this god was not hard to leave behind because I had no connection to it anyway.
My Many Baptisms
I would be twenty before I would hear an evangelical message on being “born again.” The message would happen at a pool party where a young hippy type with a guitar singing and preaching would lead me to baptism number two, a “believers” baptism. This new set of doctrines would create a whole new box top, an entirely different one from my childhood. A god who was angrier and more frightening, one to be feared and appeased!
Two more baptisms closely followed this one. I became involved in the charismatic movement, and they taught a baptism in the Holy Spirit and a baptism of “repentance.” These I was told did not happen with the hippy in the pool or the elders at the baptismal font.
Let me say that I’m not against any of these. Each in time, I would come to realize was roads on my journey’s map. All of them containing similar puzzle pieces, but pointing to very different images of god. I am in my late twenties now, and I’ve been sprinkled, poured, and dunked, so I’ve been spot, wet, and dry cleaned. Again, no put down intended; these reflect my attempts to connect with a God I had not met face-to-face.
The Questions
Let me jump forward here and pick up the narrative some dozen years later. I’m in my early forties and have left the “ministry” and have returned to sign painting fulltime. The last few years have been devastating. Wendy and I have had a full-term stillborn son Nathan, followed by an early-term miscarriage and a beautiful fourth child. To put it bluntly, I no longer had any idea who God was. Who I was or how anything was supposed to work! I had gathered a few puzzle pieces along the way and believed God existed, but not much else. My cry was, “Can we start over?”
I knew a lot of ex-preacher boys like myself, and we were meeting in homes. We were trying to decide if we should start “another” church? It was Sunday morning, and we had a house full of families and an open forum. I did what I’ve always done and still do; I popped up and popped off, speaking about not knowing the answers, but coming to understand where the answers lay. The answers were before Genesis one, one. They originate in the Trinity’s character, nature, purpose, intent, and heart’s motivation in creation and redemption. Who are they? Why did They create? And what end did They seek
The Paradigm Shift
After the meeting, I was in the kitchen getting some food when a new person I had not met before approached. He said, “I don’t meet too many people who talk like that, or are asking those questions and seeking those answers.” His name was Baxter Kruger. Baxter is a scholar and theologian who lives in my home town and was writing a book “The Great Dance” about these exact questions at that time.
Needless to say, this was one of those divine appointments! We would become friends, and through the prophetic use of words, Baxter would paint a picture of the box top that would change my inner world! He would take liquid, steam, and ice to a level I would have never imagined. The Trinity and the dance of Life and Love would transform my disjointed puzzle pieces into the Triune God’s image! The Divine Life engaged me in a way I had never experienced before. I allowed the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to embrace me in a way I never thought possible.No longer just knowing things about God, but meeting my heavenly Father face-to-face!
Meeting The Father
Everything did not become peaches and light. Far from it! But I had a foundation, a relationship, a God that was big enough to trust. I could begin to let go. The reality that God was not distant, but present and I was not alone was transforming! It was not all up to me. We were in life together. I, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were one! I could not have done this, but They had done this for me, to me, and in me! What a paradigm shift; what an amazing context in which to live.
Kruger and I have continued our love/hate relationship for some three decades now! 🙂 I owe Kruger a debt I cannot pay. I have his boot prints all over my body, soul, and spirit. It would be impossible to know the extent of his influence on my life. As C.S. Lewis said of MacDonald, “…indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.” Baxter introduced me to MacDonald, and between the two of them, it would be impossible to acknowledge their contributions in “quotes.”
My Final Baptism
Thanks to Baxter, I would have one more baptism. It was two thousand years ago in a muddy river called the Jordan. The Incarnate Son and I, with His Father and the Spirit present, went down into those waters together. Jesus needed no baptism, no believing, no repentance, and no Spirit’s filling, but I did! They fulfilled “all righteousness,” and through Their vicarious baptism, that is in my place and in my name, I received my final baptism. They did this for me, to me, and in me what I could have never done for myself! I, brothers and sisters, no longer trust in anything I have done, but only in Their faithfulness, Their finished work, Their gift of Life!
I can say with Paul, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:20 KJV