“Join with the hills and the sea! Thunders of praise to prolong,” Maxine Williams sang with the rest of her congregation. This was her favorite hymn, and she always enjoyed it whenever she sang it. Her heel popped up and down, pounding the floor like the drums she imagined in her head.

“You may be seated,” the worship leader said.

Maxine sat down, but she had hardly done so when the seed of doubt that had been creeping into her mind came back again.

“You’re too young to understand what it means. You’re too young to understand the magnitude of this decision you think you’ve made.”

Maxine fidgeted nervously with her fingers. She hoped God would work a miracle to tell her what she needed to know. Maybe God would direct the pastor’s sermon. No such luck. The pastor’s sermon was about Elisha, the youths from the town, and the she-bears. That wasn’t what Maxine needed to hear.

God, she prayed silently, don’t You think… Am I too…

She couldn’t seem to finish a sentence. Maybe she should ask the pastor after church. Yes, that’s exactly what she should do.

So, as soon as the sermon was finished and the final hymn was sung, Maxine walked to the pastor to ask him her question.

“Pastor Whitebrook,” she said confidentially, “what is the right age for baptism?”

“Well,” Pastor Whitebrook replied carefully, “I don’t really think it depends upon physical age but upon spiritual age. Are you feeling ready to be baptized?”

“Yes, sir,” Maxine answered, smiling gratefully. “I feel like God wants me to do it now.” But then the words of her Sabbath school teacher earlier that morning settled back in. The ones that had sown the seed of doubt in first place. “Um, Pastor Whitebrook,” she stammered tentatively, “what’s the meaning of baptism? Something tells me I’ve got the wrong idea.”

Pastor Whitebrook seemed more than willing to answer the question. “Baptism is a public confession, Maxine. It draws you closer into fellowship with other believers, and it makes you a member of the church. Does that help you at all in your conviction?”

“Um, yes, sir. Thank you,” Maxine smiled, turned, and walked away.

She got into the car and buckled her seatbelt, debating whether to ask her parents. She finally decided to figure things out for herself and then ask her parents to see their perspective on if she’d gotten it right or wrong.

She pondered the pastor’s words. Her common sense told her that he was the pastor, of course he’d gotten it right! But then she carefully deconstructed his sentences. Altogether it seemed like a wonderful explanation of baptism, but something just didn’t feel right about it.

He never even mentioned God, Maxine realized.

This shook Maxine. For her whole life, a decade and three years, her life had revolved around God. And now, at 13, she wanted to get baptized because she thought that a baptism meant committing your life to God in a public way. But Pastor Whitebrook had only said it was “a public confession.” He had never mentioned what the public confession was about.

Unfortunately, Maxine had forgotten that she had shared her plan to ask her Sabbath school teacher this morning if she should get baptized or not. Mr. Williams hadn’t forgotten.

“So, Maxine, how’d it go with your Sabbath school teacher?” he asked, glancing at Maxine’s brown eyes from the rearview mirror.

“Huh? Oh, um, fine, I guess,” Maxine muttered helplessly.

“What’s on your mind, Maxine?” Mrs. Williams asked, turning in her seat to look at Maxine with the huge, dark brown eyes that Maxine had inherited. The ones that always looked like they were filled with tears.

“Baptism,” Maxine shrugged. “I just… I don’t know if I should…”

There! Again, she couldn’t form a complete sentence. Did baptism have to be this stressful?

“It’s just all so confusing!” she blurted out in complete frustration with herself, her elders, her church, God, and the world in general.