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Pastor Jack said it the very first Sunday, the one that started all of this.

You don’t wait until you feel ready. You don’t wait until people stop disappointing you. You don’t wait until fear disappears. You simply move, and trust that God is already there.

I’m not nervous because, for the first time in my life, I’m not waiting to understand everything before I’m willing to do it.

“What are you thinking about?” Luke asks.

“That I don’t have all of it figured out.”

“The God stuff?”

“Some of it. Yeah.”

He nods, like that’s not a problem, because to him it isn’t. “Nobody does. Dottie’s been at this for seventy years and she’d tell you the same.” He tips his head toward the water, where the line’s moving. “You don’t have to understand it all. You just have to trust the guy holding you.”

I look at him.

“I meant God,” he says. Then, after a beat, that crooked smile, the one that’s only mine. “But also, yeah. Me.”

The line moves, and then it’s almost me, and Luke squeezes my hand and goes down the steps into the water ahead of me. He takes his place beside the pastor, water to his waist, and turns back to hold a hand up and steady me down.

I climb the steps to the edge, and I look out.

And that’s when it gets me. Not the water. The room.

Because the baptistry isn’t empty either. Along the far wall they’ve set rows of chairs for the families, the ones who wanted to see their person up close instead of on a screen, and it’s baptism weekend, so every chair is taken. For a second it’s just a wall of faces, and I have to find mine.

I find them fast. They made it easy. All together, of course they are, a few rows back, taking up most of a row and the aisle beside it, every single one of them already looking at me.

Dottie in the middle, in her good church dress, both hands pressed to her mouth.

Bo next to her, up on his knees on the chair so he can see over the man in front, both arms already waving at me like I might not have noticed him, which has never once been possible.

And past them the row keeps going.

Harper and Micah. Harper drove an hour and a half this morning, from a town that isn’t mine, to sit in a pew and watch me go under water, and she’s got a fist pressed to her mouth and tears are already running, not bothering to fight them.

Ivy and Gray, Charlie asleep against Ivy’s chest in a little dress. Ivy who could have used this Sunday for a hundred things that actually needed doing, and who is here instead, crying into the top of her daughter’s head.

Natalie, beaming at me so hard it hurts to look at. Brandon and my entire life group scattered in the rows behind.

Every single person I let all the way in this year is sitting in this room right now, on purpose, because I’m here.

I spent ten years certain that letting people in was just signing up to get hurt.

I let all of these people in. And here they all are.

I don’t make it to the water dry-eyed. I want that on the record. The woman who does dread for a living, the calm one, the one nothing touches, stands on a platform in a gray T-shirt with the whole thing running down her face before she’s even gone under.

I go down the steps into the water, and Luke’s there, water to his waist in a gray shirt of his own, and he takes my hand and steadies me down the last step, and for a second the whole packed room falls away and it’s just us, standing in warm water in front of God and everybody, the firefighter and the wrong number.

“You ready?” he says, low, just for me.

“No,” I say, and I laugh. “Yes. Both.”

He smiles, and then his face goes serious in the way it only does for the things that matter most. The pastor introduces me to the crowd and the camera pointed at the water. Then he asks, “Olivia, is this your testimony that Jesus died for your sins?”

“Yes.” I nod, barely able to keep it together.