Jayber's Journey

For folks who read a book once and are done, it is hard to comprehend someone like me who often reads a good book not once, but several times.  For some reason I picked up "Jayber Crow" by Wendell Berry again the other day for a read that is past being able to count.   What struck me strongly this time was the chapter about his journey home.  When he left where he was, he did not know where he was going.  As he walked he found himself being drawn to the place where he knew he belonged.  It was not a long journey, but one taken through a winter storm of rain and sleet along the edge of raging flooded river.    

The more I read, the more it seemed like a walking baptism.  He was not the man who started the journey, he was unsure where he was going at the beginning, and by the time the drenching rain had stopped he knew he was home.  Maybe what I read was being read through the lens of where I am, from whence I have come, and to where I am going that caused me to see what I saw, but it sure seemed like a baptism to me.  Baptisms rightly experience are not social events, but deep spiritual events with life changing power.  

They are also moments of setting out on a journey to know-not-where.   It may not be so obvious before the water dries that we are on our journey home, but baptism is a step in that direction.  It also brings us to a place of knowing that we are not alone, of knowing that we belong in an invisible Kingdom, and that we will be loved and will know the care of a community unknown to us before the waters touched us.  In some mysterious way it is God who calls us to this journey of grace and faith and most of us have to walk the road for a spell before we realize how He has been leading toward Home all along the way.