This past Sunday we had the chance to celebrate the baptisms of Joan, Melissa and Ping Hay. It was a wonderful time to see just how good God really is and how he pursued each one of them so personally. Joan shared her testimony on Friday and then during the main Sunday service at Gracepoint, telling us of how her selfishness led her to see her need for God and just how grateful she was that Jesus came to die for her sins. It’s hard to believe that God could so thoroughly change her in less than a year. Afterwards, our 3 IGSM members and 10 others from college and Praxis were baptized amidst a lot of applause, cheers, and congratulations.
We took a lot of pictures, bestowed gifts on them, and then headed to Buffet Town to have banana splits (ice cream). Ping Hay and Melissa shared their testimonies with us there, and we again saw how much God wanted them to be saved even though they each told stories of how they responded to God, wandered, and it was there that God really met them. We ended our time by having different brothers and sisters come and share about each of the baptism candidates. Sharon summed up the testimonies well when she said that these 3 are seemingly so attractive and competent and the best of their societies, and yet God met them each in their brokenness, for which we could all thank God for rescuing each of us in our brokenness too.
If you missed it, here are the pictures–remember to say congratulations to them!
It was a bittersweet morning, as we were happy to have met so many new international graduate students, visiting scholars, and other friends over the past six weeks, but sad that our last class ended. Aside from working on specific aspects of English pronunciation and sampling different types of American breakfast (the cereal was classic), students also discussed thought-provoking questions about life through watching vignettes from movies such as “Toy Story” and “Deep Impact”.