Baptism by Fire

We had a crazy thing happen this past weekend. We had a baptism. That's not the crazy part though. We went about two hours before hand, as we often do, to fill the font before the actual baptism. So, most font controls have four parts: a handle controlling water flow to the font, two other handles controlling the ratio of hot and cold water and a gauge telling you how hot the water is. The thing about the font we used this past weekend is that it DID have the water flow control valve, but did NOT have controls for the temperature. It did however, have the gauge to show us the temperature.


So, Elder Kraus, who was with me at the time, and I start filling the font and go to set up chairs, returning about 10 minutes later to check on everything. Steam pours out of the door as we open the font entrance and we know something's wrong. I run in and check the gauge.


105. Not good.

I run into the kitchen in the church, looking for bags of ice that so often frequent the freezers of the church, only to find a half-empty bag mocking me, the ripped plastic forming some sort of sadistic grin knowing it will be on no service. I threw it in anyway.

Upon return to the kitchen, I found a large (I mean LARGE) pot that Elder Kraus and I immediately began filling with cold tap water with pitchers, since it didn't fit in the sink. Once full, we dumped it in the font, making lovely wakes and quite a ruckus. We looked at one another, grinned, high-fived and ran back to the kitchen. Sadly, we realized the pitcher-fill method was far too slow, so we set about finding a more effective way to move water to pot. Elder Kraus picked up a nearby cafeteria-style tray and angled it as to redirect the water into the large metal container we had used. It worked...but was very messy. Being missionaries, we would only settle for effectiveness, plus we needed something to where we could "Set it and forget it" so we could finish setting up chairs.

Atop the fridge rested a utility drawer for the freezer. I snatched it up and rested it on an upturned bowl on top of the tray and it cascaded down the drawer into the bucket nearly flawlessly. Nearly. Residual water sprayed on the floor, but not enough to reformulate a plan, so we rushed back to the room to set up the chairs. We arrived back in the kitchen just in time to stop the pot from overflowing, took it to the font, heaved it in (it was very heavy) made a wake, grinned, high fived and went back to set it up again.
It then dawned upon me to use the mass amount of pitchers in the church kitchen's arsenal to make giant ice cubes (ok, they weren't cubes, they were pitcher-shaped, but what else am I supposed to call them?) to chuck in the font as a last ditch cooling effort. We stuffed 7 pitchers in the freezer and began the long process of fill, heave, wake, grin, high five, repeat.

Finally, an hour and a half later, the font was filled by 105 degree water and cold tap water via my and Elder Kraus' heaving. Becky (the young lady we were baptizing) shows up just as we're removing the pitchers from the freezer to add the ice. She looked at us, 50% shocked, 50% frightened and 100% confused and asked "just what we thought we were doing." We looked at Becky, looked at one another, then, with Kraus' solemn comment "It's for your own good," we let fall the ice into the font.

It took less than five minutes to melt.