15 years ago today, I was baptized. I was fourteen. It was mid-November and for whatever reason, on that day the water heater for the church baptistery was down. It was cold. I remember wearing the church’s button up onesie and how it was really uncomfortable, especially soaking wet. I remember how loved I felt in that moment by God, my family, and my church family.

I think I got baptized for a few reasons. I thought it was the right thing to do. I wanted to go to heaven when I died. And thirdly, I wanted Jesus to be the Lord of my life. I knew then that following Jesus was something I wanted to do. But I didn’t know how my faith would grow and change and expand over the next fifteen years. I knew. But I didn’t know.

On Sunday, a boy from our church made the same decision and was baptized while surrounded by family and friends. He knows God is good. He knows that he wants to follow Jesus. But I doubt he knows all that life holds for him – how his faith will grow and shift. He knows. But he also doesn’t.

In that cold baptistery, I had no idea all the places that my faith would go over the next fifteen years. Learning more ways to trust God and experience the Holy Spirit in Scripture, silence, and song. Losing many appendages of what my fourteen-year-old faith was as I transitioned to adulthood. From doubting that I could live into who God was calling me to be, to doubting God’s power and goodness in general. From feeling like a faith success story to feeling like a failure. I might have known a little in that baptistery, but I didn’t know much.

Through it all, I believe God has been consistently present and benevolent in my life. Both when I have felt the presence of God most strongly and when I have doubted God’s existence, I have come out on the other side with new perspective. I’ve learned that God doesn’t live up on the mountain, God comes down to live with us wherever we are. On a street corner in San Francisco, on a hill in Scotland, awake in bed late at night, at the end of a broken relationship, and everywhere in between, God finds us.

Baptism isn’t a course you need prerequisite courses to enroll in. It’s a person’s decision to do the following Jesus thing. It’s not an end goal, it’s not a checkpoint. And with that, we must accept that we don’t know what we’re signing up for. None of us do. We don’t know how our life of following Jesus will go. Will it look like we hope? Will it look like our mentors’ lives? We can’t know. But what we can know is that we are attaching our life to something that is so much bigger than ourselves. We are committing to walking that narrow road with Jesus. And sometimes we’ll stop and won’t make any progress for a while, and sometimes we’ll turn and go the other way, but God will be there with us through it all.

So baptism is a wonderful decision to make and thing to do, but that moment in the water is brief. I don’t remember too much about that day, but I remember a feeling of clarity and knowing. And while I have come to realize that we can only know so much, at the end of the day, I know for sure that Jesus is someone that I want to be like – someone I want to follow. I’m sure in fifteen years (Lord willing) I’ll look back at who I am now and think that I knew a little, but I definitely didn’t know everything.

So we can rest easy in what little we know. There’s a God who loves us wholly and totally simply because we exist. We can move in faith trusting that God will be with us no matter what comes or changes.

Let’s go and do it. We may not know much, but we know enough.