I’ve never thought much about my sense of touch, but I’m grateful to be doing it today.🙏🏽 Unlike the other four senses that are located in my head, touch is experienced all over my body, 🙏🏽 thanks to receptors that send messages to my brain via nerve endings in the skin covering my body. I find that amazing. It’s no wonder then, that out of all five senses, touch is actually vital to life.
The sense of touch is the first sense to develop in utero, and from the moment of birth, infants are inclined to suckle and nestle up with their caregiver, forming the bond needed for their survival. Even as we age, touch is an important part of mental and emotional well-being. 🙏🏽That’s because touch encourages the release of the hormone oxytocin that aids in emotion connection. 🙏🏽Without connection we’re, well, out of touch.
That brings to mind the many expressions in the English language that include the word touch. We touch base when we want to connect with others. That way we keep in touch, and when we don’t, we’ve lost touch. We’ve got the magic touch with things we’re good at, and we put the finishing touch masterful projects. Touch and go describes critical situations. Touch seems to take into account the action itself as well as its effect.
Perhaps the power of touch was best illustrated in the Bible by the many accounts of people who were cured from blindness, leprosy and a host of other ailments simply by touching Jesus or even just an article of his clothing. Of course, belief had everything to do with it, but it was touch that made it happen.
When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” ~Mark 5:27-28
