Alice chose to be baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The icing on the cake was that she got baptized on her birthday with some of her favorite people there to support her.
I honestly don't remember a lot of it because I was completely stressed out. Alice had asked me to give a talk on the Gift of the Holy Ghost. She had invited 20 families outside of our church to attend and many had accepted her invitation. And I'm terrifically uncomfortable playing hostess. I didn't even want to do it at my own wedding reception.
In the end, it was a great spiritual experience for me. I appreciated the opportunity to examine the baptismal covenant more closely and test how strong my testimony was on that subject. Alice was engaged and attentive throughout the whole thing. She was clearly acting with the faith of an 8-year-old. The knowledge of an 8-year-old. The giddy excitement of an 8-year-old. And it's beautiful that that is enough to make your first covenant with God.
She will probably remember that the water was cold. She may even remember that the bathrooms were under renovation, so she had to run dripping to a classroom nearby to change. She may or may not remember the many friends and teachers who had come to support her. I wish we had taken pictures with more of them.
I hope she chooses to build on this first covenant. I hope she experiments with this new Gift and soon discovers how the Spirit can work in her life. She's already started to mature more quickly. I think she grew two inches taller that day. She certainly starts more sentences with, "Now that I'm eight..."
She's a lovely person to watch grow up.
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That she is! A lovely person now and in the making.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful.
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