Brian and Cindy

Saturday night as I pulled into the parking lot at church, I saw my friends Brian and Cindy getting out of their car….a complete surprise given that they live in Kansas City! Cindy was one of my roommates in college and Brian lived in the basement apartment underneath us, and both have continued to be good friends of mine in the years since college (it helps that they are married to each other). I saw Cindy this summer, but had not seen Brian in several years. They were driving home to Kansas City from Oklahoma and decided to stop in Wichita for church Saturday night. Brian is a pastor of a church in Kansas City, and I guess pastors always like to visit other churches whenever they get the chance. I think they steal sermons or jokes or something. It’s a good thing I ran into them, because Cindy knows I get mad when she comes to Wichita and doesn’t see me. She claims that she tried calling my home phone, but I don’t have a home phone, so I have no way to test her story. I’ll just have to believe her this time. I made sure she left with my home phone, work phone, home email, and work email, so there are no excuses in the future!

Anyway, it was great to see Brian and Cindy and their daughters Hailey and Abby. We had a nice visit catching up at dinner after church. Brian and Cindy are especially dear to me because Brian baptized me several years ago. I was actually baptized when I was six (Brian didn’t do that one) at the First United Methodist Church in Salina, the year I consider the beginning to my journey as a Christian, when I first started understanding what it meant to love God and accept Jesus Christ as my saviour, as much as a six year old can. When I attended Bible College I was confronted by many people who informed that my baptism wasn’t valid because the Methodist church practices sprinkling and I need to be immersed to go to heaven. They never did convince me that I wasn’t a Christian, but after studying and learning more about biblical traditions, I did decide that I wanted to be baptized by immersion. I didn’t want to do this while I was in college, because my pride took over and I didn’t want all of my critics to think they were right. But about six months after graduation I decided it was time. I was living in Indiana and Brian and Cindy were living in Louisville, Kentucky where I would often go visit them for the weekend. On one of my weekend trips I asked Brian to baptize me, so we went up to Southeast Christian Church (the old building, which was still large, but not as big as the current arena!). It was a Friday night, after dark, and we were the only three people present in that huge sanctuary. Brian baptized me and Cindy was my witness. It was anticlimactic, but memorable. I was relieved to not feel any different, to understand that this was just another part of my journey, and not a determining factor of my eternal fate.

But back to the silliness….I did not have my camera with me at church, so I don’t have a recent picture of Brian and Cindy that I can post. But it’s okay, because it is much more fun for me to dig out old photos and post them instead. I couldn’t find any good ones of Brian and Cindy together, so here are two separate photos. This first one is from freshman year with Justin and Brian (and Matt in the background???) at Showbiz Pizza. I can’t remember why we went, but I think when we were 18 we still thought it was fun to go there and act stupid. It’s not really that fun anymore. Just loud and annoying.

This next picture is of Cindy, Lesa, Paula and I when we were all roommates in our beloved apartment. I think this is from my senior year (the first of my two senior years). We decorated for Christmas and here we are posing with the stockings that Lesa made for all of us. And some kind of weird matching earrings too. That was one of my favorite years in college. The four of us had a lot of good times together!