Perhaps the greatest contribution to the achievement of basic trust is through the experience of being fed. The experience of being fed regularly and responsibly causes the child to respond with trust, and he learns to have faith long before he knows the word for it. Later, at the appropriate time he acquires the word "faith" to point to the meaning of his trust experiences. If, still later, he allows the words to take the place of the substance of his faith, they will become empty words. Responsible parents and teachers seek to combine the right word with their action so that the meaning of the child's experiences is correlated with the words for them. A mature correlation between word and experience is one in which the child has the experience of finding people both trustworthy and untrustworthy, and has been helped to deal with the untrustworthiness in the context of trust. His first experience, therefore, is a realistic one in which he is strengthened by his experiences of trust, and is not made too anxious by his experiences of the inevitable failures of his loved ones to take care of him perfectly. The child's experience of trust and mistrust contains the first meanings for his Christian education. The care of the Divine Father is expressed in and through the care of his earthly parents. His response to the care of his earthly parents is his response to his Divine Father. This needs to be interpreted to the child as he grows up, so that he will accept and believe in the participating presence of God in human life. An obstacle in the way of this achievement occurs when people separate God from life and make Him a kind of absentee operator of the machine called the world. It then is necessary for the child to make a huge leap from his trust of his parents to faith in God. While we cannot equate parental action with divine action, nevertheless we can affirm that divine action takes place through human action. When such an affirmation is made and accepted as a part of the parents' faith and is interpreted to the child as he is able to receive it, he is helped to grow up with a religious understanding of life itself, rather than conceiving of religion as being merely a part of life. He will grow up with the idea that being trustworthy and trusting others has not only psychological and sociological meaning, but also theological meaning.