A few weeks ago I met a brother who is in the final stages of pancreatic cancer, and today I had the great honor of baptizing his three daughters. (The picture here is of a young soldier being baptized in a make-shift baptismal pool somewhere in Iraq.)
The brother in the final stages of cancer has just turned 40 and was chugging along until he got hit with terrible nausea in the middle of May. He hasn’t worked since then, and he’s lost nearly 80 pounds. It’s almost hard to fathom. The poor guy is just skin and bones, and he can’t eat at all. His physician now has taken him off chemotherapy, which was not helping him.
Hospice has moved a hospital bed into his living room, and the medical personnel is doing their best to make him comfortable and as free from pain as possible.
Today I read to him from Romans chapter 8. He said he found great comfort when I started reading verse 23:
“And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering. We, too, wait anxiously for that day when God will give us our full rights as his children, including the new bodies he has promised us.”
All three of his daughters were home today — ages 19, 16 and 10. I had met all three of them before. Turns out that none of the three had been baptized, although each is a Christian. At their dad’s request, I talked with them about what it means to be an obedient follower of Jesus. They were very open and receptive and each said they wanted to be baptized. From his bed their father asked me if there was any reason they couldn’t be baptized today at their home.
“We can put water in the bathtub,” he said.
“If you want to, and the girls are willing, I will baptize them right now.”
“I want that,” he said.
So did the girls. I took off my watch and rolled up the sleeves of my blue oxford-cloth long-sleeved shirt. We filled the bathtub up with warm water. I knelt outside the tub and baptized them starting with the oldest. Their father listened from his hospital bed in the other room as I asked each daughter if she would turn from evil and follow Jesus the rest of her life. He heard me baptize each daughter “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
“I’m really glad I got to experience this,” he said before I left. “This is very good.”
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