Sunday, July 10, 2005

My girl

My daughter is leaving tomorrow for church camp. It is a "mini" camp for only two nights. When my wife began to fill out the application it asked if the child (8-9 years old) was a Christian and whether she was a member of a church. How do you answer that? I believe she is a Christian, but she has not been baptized or "walked the isle".
This evening my wife discussed camp. Will they try to "save" her? Will they pressure her to be baptized. We had marked that she was member and a Christian, hoping that she would be spared any sort of hot box technique. But we were still concerned. My wife volunteered me to have a talk with her.
As I walked into her room, I felt the feeling my parents must have felt, when confronted with a difficult discussion. I had thought and rehearsed my questions and answers, I just prayed she'd follow the script.
"Honey, you know your going to church camp."
"Yup"
"What do you think that means?"
"I don't know, I've never been. What does it mean?"
"Well, they may ask you some questions about Jesus. Like.... Have you accepted Jesus into your heart?"
"But daddy, Jesus has always been in my heart."
I smiled. (that's my girl!)
"You just tell them that."
So much for my script.

3 comments:

Dan Trabue said...

Just visiting, having been alerted to your presence by the anabaptist monk. Very interesting. I'll be reading more.

(And Hurray for your daughter!)

Anonymous said...

I hope she has a great time, though I think it will be hard to avoid the pressure to decide soemthing of ultimate concern, or in this case, one particular concern.

The long er I do this the more perplexed I get at how silly we get about religion. Do we really think it is as simple as this? Even then, i'm saying that believing that after along hard journey of grasping after God, I have the sense that God will heal it all for us. --Tim

Tofflemire said...

Me too, Tim.