baptism in the lake

This weekend was one of those marathon weekends where you just run from one event to the next...i think we spent about 5 minutes awake at home this weekend. The activities ranged from going to a fishing seminar, to grieving with a friend who lost his mother this weekend, to having baptism in the lake, to having service at church every night with a father and son missionary team that came to visit (i guess you can call it "revival", even though i think its interesting that in the South we call it "revival" anytime we plan 3 days in a row at church with a visiting pastor, instead of "revival" being a spontaneous outbreak of the Spirit ...luckily this weekend was both!)

I wanted to share some about the baptism that i mentioned...since our church meets in an old bar/pool hall, we don´t exactly have a baptism pool like most churches do. So, the options were to bring in a kiddy pool and have baptism there at church, or pack up and head to the lake. you can guess which option appealed to us the most! We went to our favorite lake, Lake Coatepeque, to our favorite hippy hideout that you have already seen pictures of here on the blog. It´s really a funny place because there are pictures up everywhere and they hand out stickers there saying that on Dec 12th, 2012, the volcano beside the lake will erupt again (it erupted 2 years ago) and aliens will come take over the hippy hideout on the lake. They chose the date 12/12/12 because it is the last date of the Mayan calendar, and therefore supposedly the end of the world. After years of going to this place and talking with the owners, we still can't figure out if they are serious, or if its a gag to get hippies to come stay there. Anyways, we like to go there with our friends from church and even took the mission team from Quaker Gap there because it is a lovely place, but a little dark in the whole alien aspect, so we like to shed a little light there if you know what i mean. So maybe they were a little taken off guard when we drove up with 18 people ready for a baptism service! Elvis led a study on baptism when we got there, and then our pastors Wally and David bravely jumped into the freezing cold water to baptize 6 of our friends. I can´t think of a more beautiful place to share such a neat experience!