Sunday, February 14, 2010

Your dedication - Happy 4 months!

Today you turned 4 months old. And today we had the honor of dedicating you to the Lord in front of our church family. What a special way to celebrate your first four months with us! -To celebrate our hopes and prayers for your life. -To celebrate a day where love is highlighted; Valentines day. Little Malachi, this morning tears moistened my eyes as I held you close and listened to the challenge from our pastor. -To nurture you in love, ours and God's. -To model for you what it looks like to live a life for the one who created it. My greatest hope for you is that you will desire to follow Him with all of your heart. ~Mommy We choose not to baptize our children when they are babies, because we want them to make that choice on their own. We don't want out faith to be shoved onto our children. We pray that they will choose to follow the Jesus whom we love. We daily pray with them and teach them about why we love Him and why we follow Him, but we will not make these highly important decisions for them. A sweet tradition that we do embrace is dedicating them to the Lord in our church. It is not some kind of a magic ceremony where we imagine that if we do this they will follow Jesus forever and go to heaven. No, we don't believe that at all. Our boys certainly have free will, and lots of it. Instead this is a time where we declare to God and to our church family that we are committed to bringing up our children in a godly home and in a way that draws them closer to Jesus. This was a morning with tender moments that we will not forget.

2 comments:

Tracy said...

What a special day for your family! I loved the way you described the difference in infant baptism and dedication. No doubt this day will hold a special place in your memory.

une autre mère said...

We do the same with our children. Thanks for wording it so well! Congrats on his 4 months and your special day!