At ninety-seven, the old man knew he didn’t have much time left, and he decided to wrap things up in his religion by asking me to perform his baptism. It’s not unheard of to baptize adults, of course, but most people did it when they were in their teens. In the United Methodist church, we would do it when they were babies by sprinkling a few drops on their foreheads. But this man was from the same tradition as me and wanted to be wholly immersed in water. My church’s baptismal font was a small bowl placed on a little table, which would never do, so we went to the Christian church and borrowed their baptistry, which was a cross between a heated pool and a bathtub, like a religious jacuzzi without the jet action.
He was a big man, six feet three inches, still solid but weak from age. He wore an oxygen cannula and mainly stayed in his wheelchair. Usually, it wasn’t hard to baptize even a big man because I could take advantage of the body’s natural buoyancy. The person bent his knees, and I rocked him back, laying him down into the water until he was covered; then I rocked him back up, where he could find his footing and stand up. Easy.
However, washing away this man’s sins would not be so easy. There was no way to roll his chair directly to the baptismal waters. His daughter and I had to help him out of his chair, step him up to the platform, and then back down some huge steps into the water. And that wasn’t even the tricky part. Weak as he was, we held him in his standing position as I said the prescribed words:
“Now in obedience to your Lord’s command and upon your confession of faith in him, you are to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, for the forgiveness of sins, and the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
When I tried to rock him backward, he sort of crumpled and went down heavy, creating a wave that plunged both his daughter and me down into the cleansing flood with him. I managed to keep my head above the surface as I maneuvered him into the depths to get him good and saved, and then we lugged him upward. All of us were sputtering as we dragged his wet, heavy body back up the steps, swaddled him in towels, and plunked him as gently as possible into his chair, where we reattached his cannula.
I was toweling my hair dry when I heard him say, “I’ve been waiting to do this for seventy-five years.”
I pulled my towel from my face and showed a little exasperation when I said, “For God’s sake, what took you so long?”
“I was scared,” he whimpered.
I knew he was telling the truth. It’s scary to come into a church to let the preacher manhandle you as you face God, your sins, and the metaphorical watery grave. But I’ll give him and his family credit. They got it done. Now, he was born again to live in newness of life, which, given his age, probably wouldn’t last very long on this mortal plane.
Deep Calls 
I spent seven years pastoring a small church in Indiana (my second of three old lady churches whose hands I held as they slowly — too slowly — gave up the ghost), and made a good friend of both deacons (80something and 90something respectively). Just after I moved to my third and last church, the “younger” deacon came to me to ask if I would baptize him. He’d been a deacon for nearly fifty years! I asked him why he hadn’t been baptized before. He told me he came from a Church of Christ background where water baptism was a requirement of salvation and he didn’t believe that it was. When he left that church, having married a Baptist, he vowed not to bow to the tradition of the church in which he was raised. (Ironically, his last name was Campbell.) He said my time as his pastor had convinced him it was the right thing to do.
I had never emphasized the need for water baptism in my sermons, but made a few trips into the “cross between a heated pool and a bathtub, like a religious jacuzzi without the jet action.”
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Great Story. Campbell, huh?
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