In his book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Marcel Marques tells of a village in Central America.  A strange virus strikes this community.  Its most notable symptom is amnesia.  The villagers must hire a person from outside the village to help them recover their memory.

This person goes about the village, putting signs on just about everything - signs that remind the stricken villagers  of what the various things' names are.  "This is a ceiling," says one.  "This is a table," says another.  Before long, the village has sprouted hundreds of these little signs.   The outsider places two signs outside the village.  One says,   "This is the village of Macondo." The other says: "God Exists."

Baptism functions for us as one of those signs.  The sign of the cross on our foreheads reminds us not only that God exists, but that God takes delight in us.