Letting it Flow

She did it.  She got dunked.  That little girl of mine with the big grin and the never ending supply of questions went and got herself dunked.  I knew it was coming.  She’s been asking for sometime, at least for over a year now.  I mentioned her desire for a dunking in a poem I wrote in April of last year, but I know she’d asked for months before that.  And now that she’s officially dunked, I’m not sure the grin will ever come off.

I have to admit I was a little apprehensive at first, but not because I doubted my six-year-old’s love for Jesus Christ.  She talks to Him and sings for Him much more than I do.  She loves Him and He loves her.  She prayed for snow on her birthday and Jesus delivered.  Christ loves us and she knows it.  She also understands his truest display of love, that he died for the sins of man…for hers and mine and yours.  Even though I told myself I wanted her to “understand more” before she took the step of baptism, that wasn’t the true source of my apprehension.

I was more worried about the years to come and the battles they would bring….the middle school years…the teen-age years…the “off to college” years.  I masked this concern in a conversation with a friend when I brought up the name of a young man who had gotten into some trouble a few months after getting baptized.  “But don’t doubt his salvation,” my friend told me.  “Only one man (Jesus) ever made it through life perfectly.  That boy experienced a God-moment and it can’t be taken away, even if he stumbles some afterward.  Remember that Peter, a man who walked with Christ for three years, would stumble and deny Christ.  And look how the Lord used him.”

Less than an hour after that conversation, my wife, who that very morning on the ride to school had to tell my persistent daughter that we’d talk about baptism again later that evening, called me simply to say that when she randomly opened her Bible for a devotional, her eyes fell on Matthew 19:14.  Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”  In that God-moment we knew to quit being obstacles in our daughter’s own God-moment. 

The girl was getting dunked.

That evening we talked and we prayed and we watched her face light up.  What put me most at ease was fully understanding what drove her desire to be baptized.  She didn’t just want to become a Christian, in her heart she already was a Christian…she wanted to show it. 

And that is what “getting dunked” is all about.