The One Wash That Held

"How often do you have to do it?"

Reeta said it into the church kitchen at about four in the afternoon, with a mug in each hand and her back half turned, and it came out flatter than she meant it to.

Joyce was drying a tray. "How often do you have to do what, honey?"

"Get baptized."

Joyce laughed, not unkindly. "Once."

Reeta said, "Right," and put the mugs down, and did not believe her.

She thought about it all the way home and while she made supper and took the tray in to her dad, who has not been able to lift his left arm since the February before last.

She thought about it at eleven, which is when she does the sheets.

That is the hour. Strip, load, hot cycle, and while it runs she sits on the step by the back door with the machine going behind her and her socks off and her feet on the cold tile. Then the dryer. Then remake the bed for the morning, corners tucked, so that when she gets him up it is not a production.

And tomorrow the same. Not sometimes. Every night for nineteen months.

She is not bitter about it. That is the thing people get wrong when she tries to explain. She loves him. She would not hand it to anybody else even if there were anybody else. It is only that her life has quietly turned into one category of task, and the category is: things that undo themselves while you sleep.

The sheets. The dishes. The lawn. The prescriptions. The forms that renew. The floor by the back door where the wheels come in wet. Every single item on her list is a thing she will be doing again, and she has stopped noticing that she thinks of everything that way now, the way you stop noticing a hum.

So when Joyce said the word once, Reeta's whole mind slid off it.

She heard a nice thing to say. She heard the way people talk about a diet or a decision, where once means once for now, and then it is a Tuesday in March and you are doing it again with less enthusiasm. She did not hear a fact. There was nowhere in her to file a fact like that, because she does not own a shelf marked finished.

She got up off the step, moved the sheets to the dryer, and stood there a second in the warm.

And she said out loud, to nobody, "Once, though."

If your life is also made of things that come back, and if somewhere in you the good news has quietly been sorted in with them, into the pile of what has to be kept up, then I want to stand in the warm by the dryer with you. Because there is one washing in the whole book that was never built to be repeated, and it is the one with your name on it.

The one that was never built to come back around

Water is in this book from page one, and it is not there as hygiene.

God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.Genesis 1:10

Gathered. Held in one place on purpose, so there was somewhere to stand. The very first thing water does in Scripture is make a life on dry ground possible, and it does it by being collected rather than by being spread around.

Then, much later, the washings. Leviticus has a great many of them and so does Numbers, and here is the thing nobody says out loud about that: they were repeatable on purpose. A person washed and was clean, and then time passed and life happened and they washed again. That was not a design fault. That is what a rehearsal is. A rehearsal runs again on Tuesday because the thing it rehearses has not arrived yet, and every one of those basins was a rehearsal with a date penciled in.

You have been reading your own life as a series of rehearsals with no opening night. The word says otherwise. His Spirit is the reason that sentence will not stay theoretical in you.

Then God says what He is going to do about it Himself.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.Ezekiel 36:25

Count the pronouns. I will sprinkle. I will cleanse. Nobody in that sentence is scrubbing. The one holding the water is God, and the one being rained on is the person who could never get it off, and Ezekiel wrote that down centuries before anybody could see how it would be done.

Then a man is standing in the Jordan and the crowds are coming out to him, and something has changed in the water. It is not a basin in a courtyard any more. It is a river, and you go down into it, and you come up on the other side, and the whole grammar of it is crossing rather than cleaning. When Peter stands up on the day of Pentecost and tells three thousand people what to do, it is that: be baptized, and receive the Holy Spirit, and nobody in the account asks him how often.

And then Paul, writing to a church with a past, puts it in the tense that settles the whole question.

And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.1 Corinthians 6:11

Read the tense out loud, because that is where the relief is. Not you are being washed. Not keep yourself washed. You were washed. Done, dated, over, and the two names attached to it are the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God, so it did not run on anybody's stamina, least of all yours.

You were washed. That is not encouragement and it is not my opinion. It is a completed verb, written into a letter God preserved for two thousand years, and His Spirit took it off that page and put it on you.

Think of the sea. A whole nation walked through on the ground, once, and came up on a bank they never stood on again. Nobody went back the following Tuesday to re-cross. The water was behind them and it stayed behind them and the thing that made them different was not their walking, it was where the water was.

That is why the crossing is not on your list. A list is for things that undo. There is no version of tonight in which what was done for you comes untucked and needs remaking at eleven.

And if you have never been baptized and something in you has just leaned forward, the next step is a person and not a technique. Tell somebody who walks with God that you want this, and let them carry it from there. That is the whole of what I am going to say about it, and I am stopping there on purpose. What is written was settled for you already, and His Spirit is not standing by waiting on the arrangements.