A few weeks ago I experienced the great joy of attending our son’s baptism service. As you’ve probably guessed if you’ve read any of my other blog posts, God is a pretty big part of my life, and so getting our son baptised was a bit of a no-brainer. However, as hubby and I talked about it together, and attended our baptism preparation classes, we had the opportunity to think a little more on why it was so important to us that we had him baptised. And since my little one is currently snoozing away peacefully (after a week of refusing to nap he seems to be catching up on his sleep a bit, at last!) I thought I’d try to put down on paper, or rather screen, some of the reasons…
We believe in God!
This first one is probably the most obvious – my husband and I love that we have a relationship with God, and we want the same for our son. We intend to bring him up knowing God, and we hope that the groundwork we lay during his childhood will help him to have a similar relationship with God as an adult. For us, baptism is a public declaration of this intention.
We know that we’ll need help
While we are planning to ensure that God is an everyday part of our son’s life, we know that we can’t help him to know God on our own. Through baptism, we are asking our son’s wonderful godparents to help us in showing him life as a Christian. We also plan to lean on them generally for help as we navigate our way through parenthood (which they know, as they already do so, so much for us…).
We know that we’ll need even more help
No matter how wonderful our son’s godparents are, we also anticipate that the famous saying about it taking a village to bring up a child is going to be true. And we are so blessed to be part of an incredible church community. By having our son baptised at church, surrounded by so many amazing friends and family members who have been there for us at every step of the pregnancy and early months of his life, we are also enlisting their help in showing him what it means to live life with God.
And we know that we’ll also need yet more help
And of course, we’re enlisting God’s help. Through the baptism service we ask God to protect this tiny person, in every way he needs, from all the things life is going to throw at him. We strongly believe that the best thing we can do for our son is to try to bring him up a Christian, and I’m pretty sure with that sort of thing we can ask for God’s help.
We want to say thank you
We know very well that our son is a gift from God. His name means “God saves”, and that’s definitely been our experience over the last few years. We know that we are fortunate enough to have this wonderful boy in our lives because God has given him to us, and so we think it only fitting that we say thank you.
We want to welcome him
Our last big reason for baptising our son is that we want to welcome him into the church family. These people will be his family for many years to come, and we have already felt the great love that they have for him. He’s so lucky to be able to grow up among such incredible people! Which means that it’s important for us to welcome him formally into that family. And what a welcome it was! I felt very emotional, and in fact feel quite emotional thinking back on it, as we prayed for him, as he received the sign of the cross, as the water was poured over his head.
The reasons above are by no means the only reasons to have a child baptised, and there are many sound theological reasons that factor in this decision too. But for us, these are some of the big ones, some of the ways in which baptism is so important to us. We’ve no idea what is to come for us and our little boy over the years, but we do know that we go into it with the love, fellowship and support of our church family and our God.