I grew up in a tradition that deeply valued coming forward to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. This tradition has some of its roots in camp meetings and tent meeting “revivals,” and you used to “walk the sawdust trail” down the aisle to go forward and repent and pray to receive Christ after a particularly terrifying sermon.

And you had to mean it when you asked Jesus into your heart, or it didn’t count, and then you got baptized.

It was an individual thing.

About five years ago, I started on a project (one of many abandoned projects) that was meant to be a collection of songs. I can’t write music worth beans, and my best music was stolen from other people without me realizing it, but I can turn a phrase okay.

The first song in that collection was called “Walking Backwards on the Sawdust Trail.”

With every head bowed,
And ev’ry eye closed
Nobody looking around,
Has anyone here
Gotten triggered by this
And started to wonder what’s real?

(Refrain)
Oh I’m walking back-ward
On the saw-dust trail.
If there’s a re-vie-val
I’m going the o-ther way.
Maybe I’ll just walk out
Get hit by a bus
Go to hell…
Or maybe I won’t.

I’ll spare you the rest. I wasn’t abandoning my faith or anything like that; it was more about walking away from that particular expression of faith.

This morning, I preached about baptism and how we are called in love before we are able to respond in faith, and how baptism represents that, and how I hope my kids never worry like I did about whether they meant it hard enough. Hopefully, they will never feel that pressure I felt, to raise your hand, to come forward and accept Jesus again, to walk down the aisle, and they’ll never have to “walk backwards down the sawdust trail.”

Then my two children were baptized during worship at the church where I was installed as the pastor this afternoon, by a pastor who has become a very dear friend.

And after they were baptized, my pastor friend took their hands and she led them down the aisle to be welcomed by the congregation – a congregation that had pledged during the service to love and support them in their faith.

I didn’t realize until now, over 9 hours later, that they were walking the aisle in the opposite direction I was pressured to walk it.