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TITLE: The Old Baptizin'
By Mertyce Greene
09/23/06
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Please critique. I am involved with the church’s prison newsletter, so I definitely want to be understandably persuasive. Cut me up. I can take it.
Standing on the banks of the muddy river, the solemnity of the occasion meant nothing to me or my sister. Oh, yes, I had been baptized as a young child, but now I was a wise pubescent there by chance with my elders who had mandated that we accompany them to this auspicious event. We eyed each other and snickered, my sister and I, when my grandfather folded the heavyset woman rapidly down and up in that muddy river water. And when she came up talking in tongue and doing what we designated as the heebie jeebies, though we knew better, it was all we could do to keep from laughing out loud. The tears ran from our stifled hilarity at the ignorant old folk’s religion ritual so that we fit right in with our ethereal weeping elders.

Later, I was to learn that my charismatic minister grandfather was held in very high esteem in our community. He could stop a train, they said. And once, they told me, he had prayed so until a dead man got up from his deathbed.

But, the baptizin’ drug on for hours it seemed. Old folks, young ones and babies, My grandfather said the same words and pushed them down and under. Each one came up praising God in their own way; some voices high and squeaky, some booming low and all ranges in between. It was awfully funny how each one had said, “Praise the Lord” in their own crazy way.

I don’t laugh anymore, though. Neither does my sister.
“You’ll know it when you get it” My grandmother used to say.
“When praise goes up, blessings come down”, she also used to say.

Both she and my grandfather are gone now so she wasn’t there that time in the old neighborhood I prayed about it and the murderous dope dealing enemy left us alone for good, forever! And I got the heebie jeebies. I really got ‘em when the good Lord gave me a miraculous blessing I never even suspected nor did I think I deserved. I don’t laugh at the old folks anymore because I might just be one of them now, anyway, who laughs with joy at His many blessings, at a God who changes not, but is always new- the same today; the same God today as he was yesterday in yesteryears.
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