Excited!

Today our entire family was baptized by immersion.  I am thankful that I was able to share this experience with my family, as we publicly declared our faith and dedication to Christ.

The experience presented itself, because we were interested in joining the church that we had been attending for the last 9 months.  We could have easily joined by simply transferring membership from our previous church to this church, but my husband and I had been talking on and off for a couple of years that we wanted to be baptized by immersion.  The fact that our children were also ready to make the same statement at this time was coincidental.

Last week, we videotaped our testimonies in preparation for today.  That was the most stressful part of the experience.  Getting my kids to string together coherent sentences about their faith in front of a camera that was filming them was nearly impossible, and required many takes. Many takes. After an hour and a half of coaxing, prodding, and nice mommy nearly turning into psycho frantic mommy, I was not above begging, pleading, and bribery just to get my shyest child to speak at all. I was sweating as though I were doing aerobics by the time filming was over.  My husband had three takes involved with his testimony.  One was interrupted by my youngest swinging her foot and banging a metal chair while I was holding her.  Oops!  My husband in a rather frustrated voice accused, "Are you kidding me?" He started again. The second time, my eldest backed into the aforementioned metal chair, making a another loud noise. He lifted his hands in the air and said, "Come on!" Guiltily we stepped further away from the chair, determined not to interrupt again, though it did have its funny side.  The third time he filmed his testimony, I noticed something slightly amiss, but I didn't dare speak a word of it. I did not want to make him self-conscious or even worse yet, have him give up in exasperation himself.  So, I listened quietly and let my commentary go.

Today, was the big day.  We were able to watch and listen to our own videos and then we were baptized.  My husband went first out of our family, and then was able to stay in the water with the pastor for the rest of us.  It was kind of neat, that as the head of our household my husband was able to partake in the individual baptism moments for each of us.  I was pleased and surprised at the smoothness and the ease I felt with the ceremony.  On the way to lunch however, my husband said to me, "Well, it seems possible that I could have started a new drinking game today." At first I was a bit puzzled, but he continued, "Could I have said I was 'excited' just one more time in my testimony?" I burst out laughing, and said, "I lost count after 6!" It was true. I noticed it during his taping, but there was no way I was going to interrupt him and point it out. Good thing it wasn't a drinking game! In his defense, his use of excited was very much our fault, because during his first two tapings he didn't even come close to using the word that often.

I think that we will always look back on this day with both fond memories and a little bit of humor.