Church Babies

As a college student I didn’t have babies in church meetings for several years. Now I do again.

The other day at church I was closing my eyes and listening to all the sounds babies and toddlers make and it made me laugh. They are the same sounds that grown-ups make, but grown-ups only make those sounds after getting in serious car accidents, or maybe when getting tortured.

I started wondering what babies think about the sounds they are making. When a baby moans, does he know that it sounds like his fingernails are getting pulled out? Does the crying baby know that her screams are the same sounds I would make if my hand got severed from my arm?

Maybe for a baby, in his or her limited sphere of experience, getting bored in church is a nine or ten or the pain scale, just like how it would be a nine or ten for me if my ears got pulled off my head. That makes our church meetings sound like a torture chamber, but maybe to them it is a torture chamber.

I guess I am really glad that our frame of reference changes with age. Imagine if your co-workers started moaning and bawling whenever they needed to go to the bathroom. Actually maybe that would be funny… at least for a little while.