Back in the thirteenth century, the German king, Frederick II, conducted a diabolical experiment intended to discover what language children would naturally grow up to speak if never spoken to.
He thought it would be German. Some things are just obvious, right? So King Frederick took babies from their mothers at birth and placed them in the care of nurses who were forbidden to speak in their hearing. But a second rule was imposed, as well: the nurses were not allowed to touch the infants. To his great dismay, Frederick’s experiment was cut short, but not before something tragically significant regarding human nature was revealed. As you may have guessed, the babies grew up to speak no language at all because they died.
In the year 1248, an Italian historian named Salimbene di Adam recorded, with an air of scientific observation, “They could not live without petting.” The babies literally died for want of touch.
Astounding!
Modern medicine calls this phenomenon, “failure to thrive.” What you and I know is that the first language of our humanity is not a language; it's not even touch. Our first langauge is love. For some reason, we humans flourish under the influence of love and we gradually die without it. The implications of this fact are huge.
Consider the research of Dr. Dean Ornish, the founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in California. In his national best seller, Love and Survival, Ornish presents study after study demonstrating that love is a chief influence for mental, emotional, and even physical health. He summarizes the unexpected message of the rapidly accumulating body of data: “Anything that promotes feelings of love and intimacy is healing; anything that promotes isolation, separation, loneliness, loss, hostility, anger, cynicism, depression, alienation, and related feelings often leads to suffering, disease, and premature death from all causes” (Dean Ornish, Love and Survival, p. 29).
We are literally engineered for love. We are made for love, as if our DNA contains the message, “You must love and be loved in order to survive.” But why? Why love. Science says that's a mystery. For them the “mystery remains. No one can fully explain, why love and intimacy matter so much."
Let me let you in on a little secret. We know why. We know that we are made in the image of God. And if God is love, so are we.
Note: The above version of this story taken from http://www.digma.com/digma-images/video-scripts/fredericks_experiment.pdf
The video can be found here: https://digma.com/fredericks-experiment/?video=play