For much of 2015, Justin Bieber has been trying to remake his image. Has it worked? Not really. I’ll give him credit for not being as much of a spoiled brat as he once was, but he still comes across like a sociopath trying to learn how to fake being likeable. One of the most interesting parts of the story of The Redemption of The Bieber is that he’s literally come to Jesus. He reunited with his faith, to some degree. Bieber grew up a churchy, religious kid in Canada. You could say that when he moved to LA, all hell broke loose, but I don’t blame LA as much as I blame Justin’s parents and his management team for never saying “no” to him in his formative years.

So, when Justin decided last year that he needed to make some changes, he decided to go back to church. Not just any church though – he went to the Angelina Jolie of churches, the Hillsong megachurch where so many celebrities have found Jesus. GQ Magazine has a profile of Hillsong and it involves a really interesting/funny story of the main guy, Pastor Carl, baptizing Justin Bieber. The whole article is worth a read, but the Bieber story in particular is just… perfection. I think it’s because Pastor Carl talks like a member of Bieber’s entourage.

No Christian, no person, could live under the scrutiny that Justin Bieber faces, says Pastor Carl. “This boy is 21. He’s in a horribly toxic world. He is trying to do his best to figure this out. He has never been anybody but who he has professed to be, which is a work in progress.”

Last year, Justin moved in with Carl and his family for a month and a half, and they worked through stuff. During that time, Carl says, he saw tabloid reports about horrible things Justin was supposedly doing, when meanwhile Justin had been sitting there in his kitchen the whole time. It is helpful to think of Justin Bieber here, at this point in his life, as a biblical character at the very bottom of a Jobian well of his own making. He had been caught being monstrous to just about everyone around him. He seemed to be spending more time with drugs than with Jesus. His music was bad. There was a petition circulating online to deport him back to Canada… But one day, according to Carl, Justin looked in the mirror and he was ravaged by feelings of loss. He got on his knees and he cried.

“I want to know Jesus,” Justin Bieber sobbed to Pastor Carl. And so together they prayed. Suddenly, Justin was overcome by the Gospel, and he said, “Baptize me.” And Pastor Carl said, “Yes, buckaroo”—he really does call Bieber buckaroo, and now you should, too—“let’s do this. Let’s schedule a time.” But Justin Bieber couldn’t be Justin Bieber for one minute longer. “No, I want to do it now.” And Pastor Carl saw salvation in Justin’s eyes, and knew that his baptism couldn’t come quickly enough.

… So Justin wanted/needed a baptism posthaste, and Pastor Carl and Pastor Judah and Justin Bieber got into a car, and one of the church’s body men drove them in one of the church’s Suburbans to the Manhattan hotel where Hillsong rents the pool for baptisms. But when they got there, hundreds of people stood waiting—someone had tipped off the tabloids. Pastor Carl called a friend whose apartment complex has a pool, but when they arrived, dozens of people were waiting there, too.

“So I called my boy,” Carl says. Carl has many boys, but in this case his boy was Tyson Chandler, who was then on the New York Knicks. It was 2 A.M. by now. The Knicks had beaten the Miami Heat earlier that night. He knew Tyson lived in a fancy Upper West Side building with a pool. “I said, ‘Bro, I’m in a jam here. I have JB with me, he wants to get baptized.’ He’s like, ‘Done. Easy.’ ” But they arrive and there’s no access to the pool; it’s too late. Then Tyson realizes he might have another solution. He reminds Carl that he’s seven feet tall and that his bathtub was built to spec. Justin Bieber is slightly tinier than that, and so they go upstairs to Tyson’s place, and Tyson’s wife makes some food and lays down some towels and Justin gets into the tub, and down Justin Bieber goes, and he comes out of the water, and he is reborn.

And that is an image that will stick with you, let me tell you: Justin Bieber, on his knees in Tyson Chandler’s bathtub, wet and sobbing against Pastor Carl’s chest, so unable to cope with being himself that he has to be born anew, he has to be declared someone entirely different, in order to make it through the night.

[From GQ]

And so Justin Bieber was baptized in the only way that Justin Bieber could conceivably be baptized: in an NBA player’s specialized bathtub in a fancy Upper West apartment. I don’t mean to be glib – if Justin has a relationship with Jesus, then God bless. I hope his faith helps him and makes him a better person. But this story is amazing, right? “Sup, bruh, I gots Biebs here and he’s ready to accept JC, can we use your tub, dude?” Apparently, Hillsong is legitimately popular with celebrities too – Selena Gomez goes there. So does Kevin Durant. And Bono.

A photo posted by Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) on Dec 9, 2015 at 11:58pm PST

Photos courtesy of Instagram, WENN.