Paul in Baptizes Lydia in Philippi

Beautiful lake on the way to Philippi

From Turkey, Paul went to Philippi, a Roman colony in the Macedonia region of Greece. As usual, he wanted to talk with people about Jesus Christ.

"On the sabbath we went outside the city gate along the river where we thought there would be a place of prayer. We sat and spoke with women who had gathered there. One of them, a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, a worshiper of God, listened, and the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying. After she and her household had been baptized, she offered us an invitation, 'If you consider me a believer in the Lord, come and stay at my home,' and she prevailed on us."
                                                                                                                    Acts 16: 13-16

The slabs of stone in the photo above date to the time of Paul.

In way, it's amazing how quickly some of the people Paul spoke to, like Lydia, were converted. They had gone along their whole lives believing what their parents believed, and what likely generations before them had believed. Then they hear the Good News of Jesus Christ and they believe--God come down to earth in human form, walking among them, and proclaiming the most fantastic things: the last shall be first, love your enemies, you must die to yourself to live, through suffering and the cross comes joy, death is not final. Maybe it was a relief to believe this, as impossible as it seems. Maybe, as Jeremiah said, God has written his law on our hearts and we know. We know what is good, true, and right, and it isn't the worldly wisdom of me first. It must have been so liberating to have someone come along and tell us how it really is, that God walks among us and within us, and what we know in our hearts to be true is true even if the world doesn't always reflect it.

Above, Fathers Michael and Bob prepare for Mass at the river where Lydia was baptized. It was difficult to hear Fr. Bob's soft voice above the rushing water, but I did hear him say at the end of his homily that we can surrender to God, step by step. Step by step in Latin is gradatim and that was my grandma's high school class motto: Gradatim.

We prepare to renew our baptismal vows.

Here is the Bapistry of St. Lydia.

Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vanity; rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves, each looking out not for his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

                                                                                                                      Philippians 2:3-4

There were beautiful mosaics throughout the Bapistry of St. Lydia. Some of the Byzantine art is so severe; I like the lightness of the mosaic below of the child on the shoulders of the adult.