Words.

I've always said that one of the things that I love about working with kids in my counseling work is that they can be very unedited.  This verbal transparency does, of course, have its risks.  Like when I was about five months pregnant with Buster and I told a little client that I was going to have a baby just like her mom was having a baby.  This little girl's unedited response was, "Geez, I was wondering why you were getting so fat!".  Lovely.

The often unedited nature of kids' responses also, oftentimes, has its heartache.

Recently, a kindergarten age friend was perched at the corner of my desk in my office drawing a self-portrait.  It was probably a good thing that she was narrating the picture as she was drawing, "This is my head, these are my hands, these are my legs...", because it was one of those pictures that might of have lent itself to other interpretations.  Let's just say that it was a bit "free-form".  We've all seen them, and my guess is that we've all created them at some point during our artistic development.

Once the picture was complete, I asked some of my standard questions including "What's good about this person?".  This little person who had been fairly chatty up until this point paused, became very quiet, and then looked quizzically up at my face and said "Well, I try really hard to be good....".  I gently rephrased my question and asked again, "What is something special about this person?". My question was met with silence, and while my heart was breaking I heard a very quiet voice say, "I don't know".

At the very core of all that I understand humans to be, I believe that each of us has infinite worth and value.  This belief stems from a basic theological understanding that informs my marriage, my parenting, my relationships with others, and my counseling work:   We, as humans, are Image Bearers.  We bear God's image.  Part of what makes us uniquely human is that, somehow, we bear or reflect or exhibit the very image of God.  Amazing.

And so, when I hear from one of the littlest among us that she genuinely has no idea what is good or special about her, my heart breaks.  She's never been told.  And, chances are, she's heard plenty of other things that would lead her to believe that there really isn't anything good or special about who she is.  And, chances are, the big people in her life were never told what was good or special about them.  Or they were told, but those messages got drowned out by the messages of broken lives.  And the cycle continues.

So, now, please excuse me for just a moment while I hop up on my soapbox.  There is a proverb that says, basically, words have the power of life and death.

Words matter.

What we say to one another matters.  What we say to the littlest people among us matters.  It really does matter when we tell a child what is genuinely good and special about her.  Let's not miss opportunities today or this week to speak life into the little people who cross our paths.

I'm hopping off my soapbox now.  And, I think I might just go whisper a few things into a sleeping Buster's ear.

(*All identifying information, of course, has been changed regarding children in this post.)