Kids at Mass - Part 2

I have a great follow up to the post that I wrote about a month ago about kids at Mass.

We were asked to be the Godparents to a wonderful little gal who has a special place in my heart. We celebrated the baptism recently and we were so blessed to be with her family that day. However, when we walked into church the community may not have felt so initially blessed to have us.

Picture this...big echoing church, 7 children ages 3 and under, 8:30 Mass...Suffice it to say, our families hair color did not match the majority of those in the congregation for this Mass.

As parents, we were sweating it. I was just praying that mine didn't decide the throw her head back in protest in the middle of the baptism and konk her head on the font...I do believe a comment was made in jest about repeating the other kiddos baptisms (which isn't canonically sound, by the way, once you're baptized, that's it!) or perhaps considering an exorcism!

There were a few outbursts and a few anxious moments, but overall the kids did beautifully! After a particularly long Mass (1.5) hours we didn't have anyone giving us the stink eye and we had a new member of the Church!!!

After Mass we were taking pictures. After all, how often are our two families actually dressed to the nines with our hair done??? As we were heading down the aisle with the priest to take our photos we were both commenting on how well the kids did and the priest looked at us and said,

"Your kids did wonderfully. Kids are our future. We cannot be a pro-life church and complain about how much noise they make or how they need to be breastfed at Mass. We can't speak out both sides of our mouth. As for me, I can always talk louder than they can. And that's the end of my sermon." And he said it all with a big smile.

Wow...what an affirmation. For a couple of families that regularly struggle with our beautiful children in Mass there couldn't have possibly been a more powerful statement made.

Frankly, I'd considered driving 45 minutes each weekend to be a part of that priest's congregation.