The waters prepared for baptism....

I noticed the following comment on a forum I follow...
However, I know the Bible wants us to give all glory to God, and that we should strive to please Him, and not to desire the praise of men. Is it okay to want both? This issue has been in my heart for quite some time and, admittedly, I am ashamed of even considering it. Yes, I want to be praised for what good I do (through God's grace alone, for I can do nothing good apart from God...no one can), but at the same time, do I really deserve it? Is it selfish to want to be noticed when I serve others, or do good things, or am just myself? Perhaps also...is it possible to forsake men's praise and live on God's praise alone? Hm...

These thoughts seem strange and far away to me now, my love, as we have come to a place where human praise is naturally a distant arena. A great but private joy comes in times like these, when we are graced by startling revelation...your dream reversal being a case in point.

So now, we are here on a plateau after a steep harrowing climb, but we are not looking for crowds to be in this place not so that any man should see where we have been, what we have fought and conquered and so applaud us; no, not so that the things we do should be praised, but rather that the people we be should prove full of the essence of God, pure within us and given free expression through us. For a time, the praises of men may matter in this walk with God, but eventually they lose their savor, completely encompassed by this salt of higher flavor.

So here is the next step taken toward this baptism I am to know, this covenant I have been given. Yet again, the imagery is affirmed, not just to you, but also to me: I read a verse in Isaiah, and as I trace its Hebrew word meanings and their roots, here is what it says, and here is what it can say.

What it says: "In measure, by sending it away, you contended with it. He removed it with His rough wind in the day of the east wind. Therefore by this, the iniquity of of Jacob will be covered. And this is all the fruit of taking away his sin: when he makes all the stones of the altar like chalkstones that are beaten to dust, wooden images and incense altars shall not stand."
Isaiah 27:8

What it can say in the Hebrew root words: By casting out or sending away the third that terrifies her, by your pleading it be taken away: you faced that hard servitude, that vain empty thing, that impatience, that unaccountable impulse driven by the feminine force sometimes put to describe--yet other times put in opposition to--the transfer of Shekinah (glowing) glory. In the heat of that day, the scorching wind brought by this (being a feminine pronoun) one will cover his "crime of ending." He will be pardoned, freed from charge. And the offspring or result of this atoning for his misstep will be to make for a sign: a stone shattered, dashed to pieces into powder and scattered to mark the ending of all false gods.

I think about the dream I had about the spiritual baptism I am oh-so-slowly in the process of receiving. I think of how in that vision, you were like glacier-made rock flour in the river that washed over me. For a time, I feared that because your place in this dream was as something inanimate and of the nature of dust-returned-to-dust, that this meant I would lose you in a human way; but the nature of faith is such that it tarries and does not necessarily believe the night-terror but waits for the dawn and the peace that comes with the light. Te light began to break on the horizon when I had the dream in which the Voice spoke as I woke and said, "Your sins of 2000 are forgiven, your sins of 2001 are not." In 2001, we made some permanent changes in life, things we never would have done had we seen them as usurping of Divine authority. When He opened our eyes, we laid all that before God, and He hit the reset button. The re-boot is finished, and the rock-flour makes sense. You became rock flour because you had attained the necessary pardoning and were visibly transformed out of any former life of self-interest and self-reliance.

....you are there now, my love, and very much alive...but now, not just a stone to be seen in its alone-strength. Instead, you are as rock turned to powder, no different in substance, but rather less visible in individuality, better because now you can bring that pewter gleam to the waters, and that unique aroma. Do you remember how I loved being near such waters in Alaska? How I could have stood there breathing the smell of them all day? I guess part of me knew, even then, that you would be in them this way.