Yesterday our five month-old son Isaiah was baptized. We sat in the back pew as our pastor elucidated the Reformed view of infant baptism. I tucked in each boy’s shirt, and explained to three year-old Isaac that we were all going to walk up front in a moment. He peered over the top of the pew in front of us, and squinted. “Where is the bath time?” he asked.

“Baptism.”

“Bath time?”

“Baptism”

“Bath-timsa.”

“Close enough.”

The pastor called us, and we went forward. I thought about how my wife, Celeste, and I came to faith in this church, hearing this man preach. I remembered how he baptized my wife and our daughter, Caroline. How less than two years later we called him in the middle of the night, to tell him the brain tumor had finally taken Caroline. How he came to us then, and hugged us beside her death bed, and prayed over us. He baptized our three sons who followed Caroline, and now there he was, a little grayer and wiser, waiting to baptize our fourth boy.

I thought about all the times I’ve complained about this or that part of his preaching, or grumbled about something the church was or wasn’t doing to my taste, yet how little I’ve prayed for him. As he dipped his hand into the baptismal font, and scooped out the cold, ordinary water that was now to serve an extraordinary purpose, I prayed for Isaiah, that he would grow to be a man like our pastor.

Later I pondered how many baptisms this man has performed. How many times has he cupped his hands in tap water, and uttered a prayer as he poured it over the head of a baby or a child or an adult? How many times has he, through heavenly grace, bridged with his palm the broken flesh of man and the sacred heart of God?

Before her baptism, our Caroline, who was only two, called our pastor “the creature,” which was as close as she could get to “the preacher.” After her baptism, she called him God. I always wondered what she saw or sensed as he prayed over her, to give her a sense of the moment’s sacredness. I wonder too, how we lose that sense, how we obliterate God’s mystery. I don’t ever want to lose that sense of mystery. I don’t ever want to lose the ability to see God through a child’s eyes.