Tucker's Baptism (and Happy Easter!)

Four years ago on Easter, Kendall was baptised at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Vandalia, Ohio.  Today, Tucker was baptised at Grace Redeember Presbyterian Church in Crestview, Florida!  The best part about today, was that most of our family was close enough to celebrate with us.  My parents, Grant's parents, and my brother and his wife all came over from Pensacola to go to church with us and witness the baptism.  That alone would have been special, but the fact that it was Easter was even more so!  We haven't spent an Easter with any family in 9 years!

For those of you that might be unfamiliar with infant baptism, and wonder why we do it, I found this great explanation.  It's worth a read, and it's pretty short.  Basically, we realize that baptism does not bring salvation; however, we are making a covenant with God to raise up our children in a godly manner - hoping and praying for their recognition of God's grace in their lives as they get older.

In our church, we are asked three questions before the baptism.  They are:

Do you acknowledge your child's need of the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ, and the renewing grace of the Holy Spirit?

Do you claim God's covenant promises in his behalf, and do you look in faith to the Lord Jesus Christ for his salvation, as you do for your own? 

Do you now unreservedly give your child to God, and promise, in humble reliance upon devine grace, that you will endeavor to set before him a godly example, that you will pray with and for him that you will teach him the doctrines of our holy religion, and that you will strive, by all the mean's of God's appointment, to bring him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?

This is so different than how I was raised, so it took me a while to come around to it.  I even avoided the subject altogether for a while after we were married, because we didn't have kids.  But Grant was raised in a church that practiced infant baptism, so he encouraged me to kind of make up my mind about it before we had kids.  After reading about it alot and listening to a really thorough discussion for it by Greg Bahnsen (called "Biblical Baptism"), I realized that this is something we needed to do for our children.

Again, we were so happy to actually have family partake in this special occasion!

After church, the kids had a little Easter egg hunt, and then it was off to our house. 

While we were preparing food, we had another Easter egg hunt in our backyard.

And we finally got a family picture!  The first one of all of us since Tucker was born.

And I thought this was cute - all three kids in swings.

As far as the rest of our Easter...Grant recently read the book Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright.  Here's an excerpt of that:

Easter ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exube...rantly in our liturgies? Is it any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom? It’s long overdue that we took a hard look at how we keep Easter in church, at home, in our personal lives, right through the system. And if it means rethinking some cherished habits, well, maybe it’s time to wake up.

And that makes sense. If you think about it, the thing that gives us hope is that we serve a risen Savior - not one who's dead and in the ground. He's risen! And that's a pretty awesome thing! It's easy to kind of forget about the reason for Easter, and just go through the motions. But it does need to be more of a celebration. We even changed our tactic with the Easter candy this year, and told the girls that the reason we have candy is to celebrate the resurrection (we don't have candy a lot, so I think they actually understood that).

We had a pretty awesome celebration!  We had champagne, and food...lots and lots of food!  I should have gotten a picture of our FEAST, but I didn't.  Here's a picture of everyone around the table, though.

I hope everyone reading this had a great Easter celebration, too.  He is risen...He is risen indeed!