salvation birthday

when we moved to little rock from charlotte in march of 1991 i decided to call markham street baptist church where i was baptized as a little girl and see if they had some kind of antiquated records to find out when i was baptized. that way i could find out how old i was when i became a believer. i was never quite sure of the age of my conversion, i always thought i was around 12 or so.

sure enough they had kept records that far back on paper and got back to me that i was baptized in april of 1967 when i was ten years old!!! i remember that i'd walked the aisle in that baptist church the week before it must've been and then baptised a week or so later. therefore, i've marked the sunday before my baptism april 12, 1967 as my salvation / born-again-in-Christ day and have it on my mary engelbreit birthday flip calendar.  

it's very hard to believe that i've been a christian now for a whopping 42 - forty-two - years. some people can't point to a specific time in their lives when they were converted to Christ, became a christian, were born again - whatever lingo-lango you'd like to use. there was a wave in christian circles back in the 1970's - it still may exist today - where it was VERY important to know exactly when you became a christian. i don't believe that to be necessary. GOD knows the exact point of your conversion, your being changed from unbeliever to believer so it's not as important, to my way of thinking, as some doctrines might lead you to think. as long as you know that you know that you are His, that's what's important (some people struggle with that, but that's a different subject for a different blog!).  in our church, when babies are baptized (not for their salvation but as a sign of the covenant God makes with His people), we pray that the child may never know a day he doesn't believe in the Lord Jesus as His personal Savior.  there are some people who have that testimony, being unclear as to when their changeover actually took place.

a bit of background: i wasn't raised in a christian home.  i've talked about this on my blog before so plzzzzzz excuse the repetition if you know this already. my mother was raised pentecostal and left those roots behind in her adult years. my father was raised jewish and did the same in his adulthood.  raising us they said "you can do anything you want to do, believe what you want to believe"   (sounds like a song?).  

i have a distinct memory of the sunday nite that i became a christian. mrs. gibbons (bless her even now, Lord!) (the mama of the neighbor family i went to church with) came inside our home with me, we went upstairs to my mama's bedroom (for some reason she was already in bed) to tell mama what happened the nite i was saved.  i don't remember mama's response that much, maybe just an "oh, good honey, that's good" or something along those lines.

and then the next week i was baptized in the baptismal font with my white gown floating up in the water (wearing shorts and a t-shirt underneath) by brother branscum. i don't remember mama or anyone else in the family coming to church that nite.....that's hazy so it may mean they didn't come. again, we were on our own in that department.

i'm so grateful to know the Lord. even after 42 years i still have moments when i wonder:  is all this christianity stuff real? is God real? but deep down in the depths of my being i do know it is real, He is real, He is the creator God, He is the Savior of my soul and He is the One, the One and only true God.  i can see His Hand providentially in my life time and time again throughout my 52 years - even before april 1967 -  and all i can say is: thank You God the Father. thank You God the Son and thank you God the Holy Spirit, the three in One. amen.