The World before Words

Little approaches the equal parts of awe and dread mingling in new parents’ souls when Baby comes to their arms for the first time.

No matter how eager or prepared parents are, even the best carry to the nursery baggage from their growing up experiences, limitations and gaps in wisdom, and deceptions about what is right when “right,” especially when “right” is a hash of what they want to believe, what they wish were true, what makes it easy for them to excuse their own behavior, and placate their own desires.

We can talk about some baggage. When we say someone is easily angered or quickly impatient, we have a mental picture of how the person behaves.

But those words address elements of the murky world beyond words, the realm of sense and impression, sub-conscious auras, the part of life we can neither express nor explain and, frankly, may not even recognize its influence.

This is the world in which all newborns are steeped, where no mental words explain their knowledge or sense about their world. Adults cannot consciously return to that world without worlds, but we can consider: What if none of my thinking was connected to language? What, or how, would I “know” anything?

What if you were the baby with no words?

If you were the baby resting in God’s arms, totally dependent on Him, yet unable to talk to Him on His terms and in His language, how could you express need or distinguish between contentment or dissatisfaction? Here is the profound task awaiting each baby, the birthright of humanity.

At least the Lord would commit no nurturing errors were you His babe. His sense of how to proceed with your care would always be astute and accurate, not misplaced or misguided, not motivated by selfishness, insecurity, or a temporal agenda. His care would always satisfy the immediate need, without violating eternal priorities.

What wordless messages do we send as parents?

But the babies in our arms have only us, with our mingled faults, earnest intentions, scientific certitude, and practical insecurity sending them streams of baffling, contradictory sensory messages. They must crystallize the barrage of non-verbal impressions into accurate conclusions about the realities of the world they have entered.

True, over time, our aural gibberish will synthesize into the miracle of language in both minds and mouths, not at all unlike Helen Keller’s profound realization when her mental sense of water melded with Ann Sullivan’s word.

From our touches, the indistinct tactile world will begin to coalesce into pools of warmth, softness, tenderness, safety, desirable–distinct from other sense pools of  cold, harshness, brusqueness, harm, unwanted.

What can parents do to limit confusing messages?

But what happens when the inevitable moments of parental uncertainty, insecurity and inconsistency occur in child care? Hurtful sense messages cannot be explained away to the little soul who sifts impressions, not words, to build an ordered understanding of reality.

Take comfort in this awed parent: 1) contrition before the Lord and 2) humble confidence in the Lord’s leading will aid now more than ever. Frankly, without those two qualifiers, I have no comfort or hope to give the most well-intentioned parent. Child rearing is a task beyond human ability.

But those who know contrition and live His leading can be confident He will direct how to meet the whole child’s needs as He would do Himself, because He is the God of No Words, as well as the God of All Language.

Parents who embrace the loving command of the Lord have an Advantage

Parents living under God’s Loving Control for themselves, have spirits attuned and geared toward communicating wordless loving control for the child.

Parents comfortable with the vital, practical, daily process of living by trusting God, have the tools to build the child’s trust hour by hour, day by day, week by week, even when words carry no meaning.

For such parents, the confidence they have to meet their child’s needs as God Himself would, is not an impertinent puffing up of parental prerogative, because their confidence swims in the ocean of humility.

In a home with those parents, the child receives a powerful wordless assurance that their sentient life is secure, significant, spiritual. Both child and parent grow “knowing” the Lord is bringing word-bound parents and impression-bound child to mutual understanding of both the language and sense of His Eternal Truth.