Mixed Emotions

We have a phrase in our society to describe the times when we experience feelings of joy coupled with simultaneous feelings of anxiety or sorrow. We call it "mixed emotions," and recently, I was struck with it in perhaps its ultimate form. On a Sunday a little over a month ago, I baptized my oldest, Jeff, into Christ.

On the one hand, there was the tremendous emotional lift experienced in realizing Melinda and I had found success, that through God, through our teaching, and with the help of many others (his grandparents, his Bible class teachers, the influence of our friends), he knew that his must be a life lived in Christ.

Over and over, we see the power of the gospel to save (Rom. 1:16). Through the coming of always one more, we are reminded of our duties to bring this most powerful of messages to the world. In many ways, it should be easiest to convince our children of the need for Christ to be the center of their lives, but it is also the hardest, in that they see us every day and know if our own lives are indeed, Christ-centered. Hypocrisy in the home is most easily detected.

There is little to compare to the opportunity to plunge your own child beneath the waters of baptism, having him come out of the water in a different, more glorified form. No one can accurately describe the joy I felt on that occasion.

It was only later that I was seized by the sorrow of the duality that this, our greatest success, had also been our greatest loss. We had, in effect, lost a child to Satan. The very acknowledgement that he needed Christ was proof of his sin. As a father, it is a disturbing thing to realize that you can no longer protect this little one from all the wiles of Satan. You can only hope to prepare him for what is to come.

And therein lies the anxiety: I realize, while I am still responsible for his "training and admonition in the Lord," I am no more the real guardian of his faith. He must come to be that himself. While I may still tell him he cannot participate in certain things, he must come to his own realization that, as a Christian, he must be different, that he must "not be conformed to this world" (Rom. 12:2), but must live his life for the Savior he professed before men. This too, is a disturbing trend for a father.

To end on a more positive note, I need only look at my own life and realize what a profound influence my own parents still exert on it. In serving this church as a deacon, my path and my heart are still guided by my father as one of our elders. The church here at Westside has been blessed with many "multi-generational" Christian families, and when Jeff took his place on a more recent Sunday, standing before the microphone to conduct the scripture reading, I realized that now the Miller family is three generations strong at Westside, and again, I was overcome by the joy of knowing my son had chosen a life in Christ over whatever the world has to offer.