text: Here’s to hope, Alicia!
  
  In the lifetime of some of us it truly was as you hope it can be.  
  
  I was baptized with perhaps 20 early teens at a service exclusively dedicated to baptism on a Sabbath afternoon in 1957.  I was 13 years old.  We had all been instructed in a baptismal class, a catechism of Seventh-day Adventist answers from Scripture to common spiritual questions.  What is God like?  What are we like?  What is the Seventh-day Adventist church like?
  
  As I recall, my membership was a matter of, having come to understand how Seventh-day Adventists were coming to answer the spiritual questions covered in the class, was I willing to accept an invitation to be a member, subject to my baptism.  
  
  And baptizing us, every minister simply said the same thing:  ‘Because you have accepted Jesus as your savior, I now baptize you …’
  
  Simple.  Respectful.  Welcoming.