This year, our church will be spending a lot of time thinking about our faith journeys. To help us identify and share our individual faith stories, we are encouraging everyone to participate in one of forty "Unbinding Your Heart" small groups which will meet weekly during the season of Lent (February 19 through March 25.)
We all have a faith story. Faith stories have some similarities but each one is unique since we all have had our own experiences in life. I have discovered that we don't really know someone until we have heard their faith story.
In preparation for our faith sharing focus, I'd like to share bits and pieces of my own faith journey. By doing so, it helps me to celebrate how God has been at work in my life and it helps others to know me in a deeper way.
I can trace my faith journey to my pre-birth years thanks to my parents who followed Jesus and were active in their church. After my mom and dad came back from their honeymoon in 1950, my mom asked my dad which church they would be attending as a couple. The choice was between my mom's Presbyterian Church and my dads' Methodist Church. I'm a United Methodist pastor so guess which church they chose!
Before I was a year old, Rev. John Wesley Stamm (how's that for a good Methodist name?) baptized me in the Stewartstown Methodist Church in Stewartstown, Pennsylvania. I was told that I was really fussy the day of my baptism!
For Part I of my faith journey, I draw attention to my baptism when I was only months old because it reminds me that God's grace is offered to us before our awareness of it. God claimed me as his child long before I could even respond to this amazing and wonderful gift of grace. It's very humbling for me to know that I was claimed by God before I was even aware of it. It's also very humbling to think how my life could have been so much different if I would have had parents who didn't have a strong Christian faith and a commitment to a local church.
In our Wesleyan/Methodist tradition, we refer to infant baptism as a sign of how God's prevenient grace goes before us, even before our awareness that it even exists or that it's being extended to us. Sometimes when I struggle with my faith, it helps when I remember my infant baptism and how God is at work and reaching out to me even though I may not understand or perceive it.
Through baptism, I was grafted into a faith community which would go on to nurture, love, teach, and guide me throughout my journey. As I grew and started to become aware of God's grace in my life, I began to respond to this grace and love and grow as a disciple of Jesus, but I'm getting ahead of myself. More of that later.
When I was born, mom and dad turned our downstairs dining room into a temporary bedroom to make it easier on my mom. As I look at this picture (see above) and notice how my mom lovingly cared for me, I think of how God's grace was reaching out to me from the very beginning of my life and claiming me as a child of God.
And so any talk of my faith journey always begins with my baptism and God's grace that claimed me before my conscious awareness of it. When I remember this early part of my faith journey, I am humbled at how God's grace enfolds us like a loving mother who holds her newborn baby with pride and joy.
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