People must live somewhere. Most live in houses. Most of those houses have walls. Most of those walls need to look good. So I have a job. Yes, I am your friendly, neighborhood drywall guy. I go to work. I sand. I spray. I wonder if we are in a recession. Just another day at the office.

The joy is when I come home, which is why I leave for work. Take tonight for example. While I try to type with one hand around Nathan, who is standing on my lap (at nine weeks), Natalie is giggling almost uncontrollably due to something Patrick MacManus wrote in The Bear In The Attic. We are working at some freezer-burned vanilla icecream, garnished with chocolate chips, while I consider whether or not this would go well with what remains of dinner’s Merlot.

Speaking of dinner, it was fantastic. Natalie put mushrooms on my side of the pizza.  (Guys, give your wives earrings, good things happen.) Life’s sweetest pleasures sometimes come in a bunch of small parcels.

It all started with a cup of coffee with her dad. That was a year and seven months ago. Who knew what all would come of it.  In the last twelve months Natalie and I have experienced: our first kiss, a car accident, home remodeling, financial ups and downs, livestock successes and failures, lots of good wine, food shared with good friends, and the birth of our first son. It has been a good year, and I look forward to many, many more.

I was drifting precariously between wakefulness and sleep. The dark tugged at my eyelids heavily. Thump. “Did you hear that?” I asked. Natalie knows the strange house sounds better than I do. “Do you know what it was?” She didn’t. She did have concerning theories about windows opening. They made me wish I was still asleep. Sleep… Yes… No… Yes… We had been what seemed like hours getting Nathan to sleep. It was my turn. I tried to listen for more sounds. Any hints that I should really be concerned. Not that it makes a difference, I would have to go check things out. But I should wake up first.
The sound of glass breaking is very singular and unique. It is instant and sharp, and yet it lingers on the air. In my groggy state I couldn’t decipher exactly where the shatter happened, but there was no question what it was, glass. Pane glass. The transition from mostly asleep to adrenaline pumped and ready to tear the arms off of whatever it was I was sure was going to come through the bedroom door was instant. It was faster than instant. I shouted, no, bellowed, hoping through some instinct to scare the demon-driven monster away. The dog, outside was barking frantically. His deep, protective bark. I scramble through my drawer for the gun. It wasn’t there. But Natalie assures me it is. She turns on the light, I find the gun, and my AAA powered LED penlight. It was about as likely to penetrate the dark as a pocket knife is to conquer the Amazonian jungle.  But I delved in undaunted. I had no choice.

There is something about having others to protect that makes you brave. I made my way from room to room checking the doors and windows. Down the stairs. I was breathing hard. No glass anywhere. The dog was still barking like mad. Maybe I missed something upstairs. My family was still upstairs. I scrambled up the stairs.

Walmart sells these rolls of padded double-sided sticky-tape. You use them to attach things to the wall. Things like mirror tiles. Said mirror tiles look particularly attractive when placed appropriately in small spaces, like our upstairs bath. I didn’t notice a warranty of any type on the packaging when I bought the tape, but I kind of expected it to last a while. But, failing that, I was left with one question. Why, out of 1440 minutes in a day, did it have to fail in the middle of the night?

The blue light of my LED flashlight cast eerie reflections on the bathroom wall off of the hundreds of glass-mirror shards on the tile floor. On the wall, one of the middle mirror-tiles was missing, leaving a gap. The relief washed over me slowly, though my heart was still pumping. The dog continued lapping around the house bellowing.  Natalie came up. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I hugged her. We both had the same thought at the same time. All the noise, the glass breaking, the yelling, the shuffling and thumping, surely Nathan would have woken, after all the time trying to get him asleep. We looked in the bedroom, and there he lay, sleeping peacefully, as if he knew everything was alright the whole time.

St. Augustine deals very interestingly with time in his Confessions. The past doesn’t exist, neither does the future, but the present does. But what is the present but a transfer of the future to the past. So there must be a present of the past, and present of the present, and present of the future. Regardless, we live in time, as God has seen fit to create a world that proceeds from one end to the other. In that time we have cycles of time. Minutes become hours, hours days, days weeks, weeks months, months years, and years one after another. This year, which is proceeding last, causes me to look back and remember the last, which has been significant. A year ago marks when she said yes. She promised to be joined to me, in flesh and mind. She is now my wife, and a wonderful wife at that. She finishes me, helps me, and adds to me. She is bearing the sign of God’s blessing to me. She is Natalie, my wife, and I love her.

I am a father. This is a spiritual reality as well as a physical one. I have fathered a child. That child has an eternal soul. Did I create that soul, no. But I didn’t create the body either. The truth is that a soul has been generated, and I was largely responsible for its generation. It seems then, that this young soul is descended from myself. Myself, who am a member of the covenant body of our Lord Jesus Christ. This covenant has been promised to me and to my children. Baptism is the rite of entry into that covenant. But baptism must be given to those who have faith. And that faith is supposed by many to only be able to be shown when one is able to articulate it. But faith in the Bible is rarely something that is articulated. It is generally something that is acted out. It is something that is closely associated with (get this) little children.

I believe my place in the covenant is one of grace. It is by grace that I am here, it is only by grace that I shall remain here. Even after the resurrection it will be a position of grace. It will be a position that will never change, but it is still one of grace. If my children enter into the covenant it will be because of grace. If they remain in it, it will be because of grace.

Now, I believe through covenant promises that my children will be in the covenant. If this is true, then they will be, already, under grace. Now one of the gifts of grace is faith. It is my understanding that my children are promised faith. If they are promised faith, and are part of the covenant, then they are deserving of baptism, the rite of entry into that covenant and the church.

That is why I plan on baptizing my first child. I understand that apostasy happens. Some fall away. But we serve a gracious God who is faithful to the faithful, and gracious to those who obey His commands and do His will. He is holy and true to His Word. I have faith because He granted me faith, and part of my faith is that He loves His little children, including the ones not yet born.