So the baby will be baptized at just over a year old and the big boys will be 8 and 5.  Whatever. I just want them to be fully part of our church community.  Also I get to put them in cute clothes and take pictures, and that’s always nice.

Anne, I know you don’t even get baby dedications, but you know me and my rituals.  How about other readers?  If you’re a parent, did you have your babies christened?  Is it odd that I’m waiting so late to do my kids?  Or is it odd that I even want to partake of such an old-fashioned ritual?

I tamped down my shock so that I wouldn’t show it to him. Instead I just asked him why he didn’t believe in God. He said “I don’t believe in things that are invisible. Things can’t be invisible.”  His favorite subject in school is science and he is a very pragmatic little scientist already, I guess.

I asked him about germs, “You can’t see germs, right? But you believe germs exist?”  Him: “Well, yeah.”  (I knew he believed in germs because he is already something of a germaphobe.  Then I remembered wind.  “How about this: what makes the trees move?”  Him: “Wind.”  Me: “Well, can you see the wind?”  Him: “No.”  Me: “But you believe it’s there, right?”  Him: “Yeah.”  Me: “So to me that’s what God is like. I can’t see God but I can see what he has done in the world.”

I don’t know–it’s tough to know how much I should “indoctrinate” my children.  I want to teach them my worldview but as I’m not always sure what that is myself, how can I push it on them?  I ended by telling him, “Daddy and I believe in God and we want you to learn about what we believe, but we can’t make you believe the same.  You are always free to decide what you believe.”  This whole thing might be too deep for a 7-year old. I don’t know.

This morning my husband did an experiment with Isaac to show him how something invisible can be real.  He used a paintbrush and lemon juice to paint words on a paper. Then he used a match to heat it up to show the words.  He wrote, “Isaac, God loves you.”

I know the rest of my family would probably be pushing them to “accept Jesus as their lord and savior” and making sure they understand that they are sinners, etc.  I’m not comfortable with that but I want them to have faith.  So what to do?  It’s hard when I’m not sure what I believe and I’m not the most faith-filled person myself to teach my children about God.  So what do you think? How should we raise our children in faith?

I have only been observing Lent for a few years now. I think I started some 5 or 6 years ago, but I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure I started even before I attended an Anglican church while living in England.  I became interested in it while reading the book Girl Meets God (recommended by our own Judith).  The girl of the book gave up reading for Lent (I’ve still never tried that one).  I was so inspired that I in turn decided to try a Lenten fast.  I think my first attempt was giving up TV.  That one was hard because my husband did not give it up with me and I didn’t want to leave the room every time he turned it on, so I ended up just leaving it off if he weren’t home and not asking for certain shows if he were home and watching.  I have also done things like give up sugar and chocolate.  For the past few years I have given up non-essential shopping every Lent.  That means I can still shop for groceries (that’s obviously essential since I have a family to feed as well as myself) and if one of my kids suddenly desperately needs something like new socks, I can get that, but otherwise no shopping.   So no browsing Amazon for books, no waltzing downtown to my favorite little boutique, no traipsing through the mall peering at clothes at The Loft or smelly stuff at Bath and Body Works.

So that’s about the giving stuff up, but as I said, I think Lent should be more than that.  It’s also about adding in more time given to spiritual disciplines, more time to think of others, more time with family.  This year I plan to try something new — something described by the priest this morning at the Ash Wednesday service I attended. He talked about how a good Lenten practice would be to look in the mirror every morning and think about the things you like about the person looking back at you, and also how to make the person in the mirror better.  He said it more eloquently, but I like the idea.  I plan to try that — a little lesson in being merciful to myself.  I have also ordered some Anglican rosary beads so when those get here I’m going to start praying the rosary — an Anglican/Episcopal version I found online.

For those who do observe, what will your Lenten practice be this year?

So you may have heard (well, I know Anne and Judith have heard) that I recently had a baby.  Actually he’s almost 3 months old now, so not so very recently.  Anyway, now it’s time to decide if we want to have him christened at our Episcopal church.  My husband and I are now Episcopalian, but he was raised Baptist and I was raised a weird combo of Assembly of God, Church of Christ, Baptist, etc.  So this christening/infant baptism thing is not really part of our own heritage.  In our previous churches babies are usually “dedicated” which is basically a commitment by the parents to raise their children in the faith, but there’s no baptism by water involved.  Then when a child is older he’s encouraged to “accept Jesus” and follow it up with baptism by immersion. (Click here to read a previous discussion about baby dedications.)

I’m ready enough to have the new baby baptized — and would like to have the other two thrown in for a 3-for-1 deal. I checked with our priest and he’s cool with that.  However, my husband has never warmed to the idea of infant baptism.  I haven’t pressed him much yet about this baby (planning to broach the subject next weekend when he’ll have the free time to discuss thoroughly) but I know how he felt with the last baby. To me it’s equivalent to a baby dedication (don’t tell my church — it’s probably not a good Episcopalian thing to say) and confirmation is sort of equivalent to the older child getting saved and baptized in a Baptist church.  The first (baby dedication/christening) is about the family committing to raising the child in their tradition; the second (confirmation/older baptism) is about the child embracing that tradition of their own will (though we could get into whether many children are actually doing it of their own will or just responding to parental/peer pressure).

My point? I’m not sure — just sharing a minor struggle of someone who has left one tradition for another. It’s not even like I converted from a whole other religion, but it can still be tough to decide how much to embrace the new tradition. My husband holds back a bit and is not as crazy about the new church, and I feel I can’t jump in and do something significant like this with our children without him agreeing to it as well.

Does anyone have a well-thought-out opinion about these things? Did you have your babies dedicated or christened? Is it really any big deal? Is it really a matter of salvation either way? If you’re pro-christening, how do I convince my still-somewhat Baptist husband that we should do this?

I have a lot in common with Campbell.  I grew up in small towns and in my early years attended a church of Christ.  Also, like in my family, it was her stepfather that brought the family into the church of Christ, though he seemed less committed to it than my own stepfather.  My stepdad was a school principal but he was also a church of Christ preacher–sometimes just a spare lay preacher and sometimes the only preacher, depending on the need, so he was very involved.  My mom married my stepfather when I was just 2 so I was brought into his church very young.  I was also baptized by full immersion in the church of Christ.

Throughout the early part of the book, her experiences resonated with me, reminding me of my own history.  I remember realizing I didn’t rank as high as boys not just at church but at school.  I remember declaring I wished I was a boy.  I tried to be a tomboy, though it actually didn’t come naturally.  I joined the boys at recess when they played football and my big brothers taught met to wrestle and play basketball.  I was not the athlete Campbell apparently was, but I did give it a try.  I remember being offended that if we played football in P.E. the teacher insisted it was just tag football if girls were involved (often just me) but the boys could play tackle football if I sat out.  So the boys (though good friends of mine) really preferred if I didn’t play so they could tackle.

Like Campbell I also noticed that I didn’t rank as high as the boys spiritually.  Even though (again, like her) I could beat any boy at a Bible Bowl competition and memorize scriptures like nobody’s business, my brothers were the ones asked to pray before dinner, while the girls were just expected to help make and clean up after dinner.  Men always did the speaking and the preaching at church, though at home I liked to line up my stuffed animals in rows and preach to them.

Unlike Campbell, though, my mom was not willing to stay in the church of Christ, particularly because of the fact that instrumental music was not allowed in services and my stepdad disapproved of her even playing hymns on the piano at home (though she did manage to have her own piano, at least).  To this day it surprises me that she ever attempted to join his church when she so loved to play the piano and the organ (and she can play beautifully by ear).  By the time I was around 12, we started attending other churches, thugh we remained on the fundamentalist end of the spectrum.  My mother was raised Assembly of God so I spent some time in AG churches, later we joined a church called a Christian church (actually came out of the same roots as the church of Christ but a bit more open-minded–at least allowed instruments) and finally we became Baptist (she’s still Baptist).

Still, whether church of Christ or Baptist or Assembly of God, like Campbell, I immersed myself fully in church–teaching Vacation Bible School, knocking on doors (though like her also rather reluctantly), etc.  I had a few more opportunities once we moved on to other churches.  In the christian church I was a key leader in my youth group and sang and spoke in front of the church.  In the Baptist church I sang and spoke in front of many churches on revival teams with the Baptist Student Union or during “summer missions”.  Still, we learned that there was a limit–we couldn’t be ministers–we could only “testify” at the pulpit and not “preach”.  (This is not true of every Baptist church–there are female Baptist ministers, but it’s not nationally embraced by the Southern Baptist Convention — see our previous post about Jimmy Carter.)

During college my friends and I began to question our second class citizenship within the church, just as we questioned many other things our fundamentalist friends took on simple faith.  However, unlike Campbell we remained within the church, at least a church, if not the one we grew up attending.  I have found a good home within the Episcopal church, as I’ve said before.

So, I’m rambling a bit, but basically I could relate to Campbell’s early life experiences.  It actually started to drag for me after she got out of her childhood. I never quite understood when exactly she stopped attending church. Apparently she went as far as to go to seminary before dropping out, but I don’t remember anything more specific.  Then she not only left the church of Christ but left church altogether.  Still, she talks about being “haunted by Jesus”.  She can’t quite get Christ out of her system in spite of rejecting that so long rejected her based on her gender.  She still feels she is a Christian, though she knows people from her childhood church wouldn’t recognize her as such.  I felt a little sad for her, actually.  I can’t imagine being without a church entirely, even though I’ve drifted so far from those I grew up in.  I still have that community and that identity and I don’t know if I could ever give it up, even if my doubts one day overwhelmed my faith.

Overall, this memoir touched me as the story of a kindred spirit — a woman who really wanted to embrace the faith her parents gave her, but ultimately couldn’t reconcile it with her own sense of what is right and just and true; a woman who loves and devotes herself to Jesus, only to discover later she’s embraced the wrong Jesus; a woman who discovers that the real Jesus is so much more than the one she’d first been taught to follow.

I know I’m forgetting some important ones here, but these are the first to leap to mind. They are kind of an odd mix, and I think I’ve edited out some that were once important to me, but which have faded in importance as I have changed spiritually.

How about you, Anne and Judith?  I know you both are big readers, too.  I probably have fewer books than either of you–I’m a big reader but I’m addicted to fiction.  I confess to having a bit of a short attention span with drier tomes.

Anyone else out there reading this?  Feel free to chime in and tell us what books have changed your life.

Three young Christian women struggle to redefine their faith. Topics: God, feminism, family, fundamentalism, and more….