Obedience in the Water
My name is Cristin Riebel. My family and I have been attending Radiant for about three years. I was baptized as an infant and then did my public declaration of faith when I was about 10 years old. And that was real. I believed in Jesus. I had accepted him into my heart. But throughout the years, I had a lot of ups and downs in my faith.
Probably the greatest of those came when our daughter Maddie was born and she was born with a lot of medical complexities and special needs. We were in the hospital a lot. Over the next couple of months, she had RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) and started having seizures. All of these things were just hitting us over the course of several months. And then finally we got her diagnosis of 1p36 deletion syndrome which is a chromosome deletion. And those first couple of months were dark and there was a lot of questioning.
When you become a first-time parent, you always have this picture in your mind that you're going to have this beautiful, healthy baby. And that just wasn't the story for our family. We found ourselves asking, God, are You still good? Are You really, are You for us? Are You really even real? And I think in those times you can either turn towards the Lord or turn away from Him. And we really leaned into our faith. And our faith, I mean, Jesus was our rock during that time. That's how we got through those days. And I think a few years after that, the Lord started asking me to get baptized again. And it was like there were just a lot of excuses, like, why, God, I was already baptized. I don't need to do that. And we're already so busy and things are tough with Maddie, and I don't feel like taking the time right now to do that type of thing.
And we moved here and started attending Radiant, and I started hearing Him ask me that again, just will you get baptized? And this past summer, there were no more excuses and I went ahead and signed up for baptism and it was just awesome. And I think since that time, we've really seen so much fruit from that. We've seen growth in our marriage, in our family, opportunities to witness and even bring people to church with us. And so I think by taking that step of obedience, it opened things up. It was the next step in my faith. And the Lord has really used that and has been so faithful in this season.