I was doing some swimming at the rec center today...taking a day off from skiing. I was the only one in the pool...doing laps. Then noticed a group of people coming in, old and young, but they did not go to the dressing rooms. They followed on a man in his 50s in a wheelchair who was being pushed to the handicapped changing room across from the warm pool (the warm water comes from a hot spring up the road in Poncha Springs). One man, however, had cut away from the group and went into the men's changing room He shortly emerged in a long white robe.
It was a baptism. The man in the wheelchair came out and several people assisted him in also putting on a white robe and getting onto the lift that helps the disabled in and out of the warm pool. He was lowered into the water. The preacher got into the pool. It was total immersion...right there in the Salida hot springs and pool rec center.
I spoke later to the preacher in the changing room as he took off his sopping robe. He said the baptized man had been a soldier, then retired, had served as a deputy sheriff in the county and had suffered a stroke about a year ago. From which he was supposed to not recover. But he did in part and had communicated to the preacher that he wanted to be baptized. But it would not work in the church baptismal pool...he had no way of getting in or out. So on this sunny day, he and some of his fellow parishioners came to the rec center and lowered him away.
Just one of the stories in Salida today.
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