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What took you so long?

Well, I'm due to be baptised on easter. Had my interview a couple of hours ago. First few questions were the expected stuff - what do you believe in, are you sure about your faith...

Towards the end, one of the church council members asked this question that left me answer-less. What took you so long?

Well I'll talk a bit about this guy. His daughter is 3 years younger than me (i think), and he later explained that growing up in a Christian family, he does expect and hope for her to be sure about her faith, and baptism is clearly one way of expressing that. So he applied it to me as well.

Truth be told I dislike the idea of being subject to others' expectations - do my parents even have the right to demand such things from me? On the other hand, it is a thought-provoking and legitimate question. What took me so long?

We see examples of people in the Bible who are baptised the moment they believed. Yet it took me 18 years to realise what Christ's death meant, and another 2 before I decided to get baptised. Shocking?

18 years to realise the significance of Christ's life and death. That is half of Christ's lifetime already. Should I have been  living in His time, I may have missed every single teaching by then.

I told the church elder - I wasn't sure about my faith. A honest answer, albeit a bad excuse for it.

2 years to make the decision to declare it publicly. Now this I haven't found out why, really, yet. I just said I wasn't ready. True, but I'm sure there's more to that. Thoughts to consider, then.
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