¹ O LORD, our Lord, 
       how majestic is your name in all the earth! 
       You have set your glory 
       above the heavens.

 ² From the lips of children and infants 
       you have ordained praise
       because of your enemies, 
       to silence the foe and the avenger.

 ³ When I consider your heavens, 
       the work of your fingers, 
       the moon and the stars, 
       which you have set in place,

 ⁴ what is man that you are mindful of him, 
       the son of man that you care for him?

 ⁵ You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
       and crowned him with glory and honor.

 ⁶ You made him ruler over the works of your hands; 
       you put everything under his feet:

 ⁷ all flocks and herds, 
       and the beasts of the field,

 ⁸ the birds of the air, 
       and the fish of the sea, 
       all that swim the paths of the seas.

 ⁹ O LORD, our Lord, 
       how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Psalm 8 deals with sovereignty. "O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Your name in all the earth, You who set Your glory above the heavens!" (v. 1). The first Lord means "Jehovah," the covenant-keeping God, the God who keeps His promises. The second Lord means "the Sovereign," the One who has not only the ability but the authority. "O Lord (the promise-making God), our Lord (the Sovereign, who has the power to keep His promises), how excellent is your name in all the earth."

When God saved you, He made you a king. You may not look like one or act like one, but you are one. Your day of salvation was a day of coronation. God put you on the throne through Jesus Christ. Then why do you live like a slave?

We discover in this psalm that God gave Adam and Eve the first crowns. But what did they do? They handed their crowns and scepters to Satan, because they wanted to become like God, to be sovereign. And they lost their dominion. Man today does not have dominion over beasts and fowl and fish. But Jesus does. He had dominion over the fowl: He told a rooster to crow when Peter sinned. He had dominion over the fish: He gathered them into the net when Peter was fishing. He even had dominion over the animals of the field: He rode on a donkey that no one had ever ridden before.

We've lost that dominion, but we've regained our spiritual dominion in Jesus Christ. You were saved to live like a king. Don't live like a slave.

Believers have a responsibility to live like kings. Our kingship securely rests on the authority and character of God. Are you living beneath your station? Determine to live like a king.

When I was five years old I started to attend Miss Dietz's kindergarten, which was in a Methodist church just around the corner from our house in Philadelphia. On the first day of school my mother walked with me to the church. When she said good-bye she explained that when it was time to come home for lunch I was not to cross the street, but must wait on the sidewalk opposite our house and call her to come out and "watch me across."

Two things that I learned there (besides one song, "Here's the Baby's Ball") are clear in my memory now. I learned that life is unpredictable. The girl in front of me as we lined up for roll call suddenly threw up, covering Miss Dietz's desk and roll book. I learned also that people, myself included, are sinful.

I picked out a white china cat from the toy box and played with it every day, building a house for it with wooden blocks. One day another girl got the white cat first. I tried to snatch it away but she got up from her little wooden chair at the play table and raced around the room with the cat in her hand. I raced, shrieking, after her. My insistence that the cat was mine was of course not accepted by Miss Dietz, and I was, I think, punished--made to stand in the corner or something. Perhaps I was only reprimanded, but although I had been scolded and spanked many times at home, this was my first public humiliation and acknowledgment of guilt. No doubt that is why I remember it. I had expected to be known as, I had every intention of being, a good little girl, and I turned out to be a naughty one. Let no one laugh it off with "But you were only five!'' or "A silly little thing like a china cat?" I knew very well that I was in the wrong.

The next year I began the first grade in Henry School. It was more than a mile from home and I covered this distance four times a day because I walked home for lunch. It was a solid, dismal brick building with a high black iron fence with spikes on it and a solid concrete school yard. I became acquainted with loneliness and fear. I started out with the unshakable conviction that everybody knew everybody else, everybody knew what they were supposed to do and where they were supposed to go. I felt that somehow I ought to know, too, but I did not know. I was lonely. I was also afraid. I was sure that I would not be capable of doing first-grade work and often lay awake at night crying about arithmetic.

Our teacher was always called "Mith Thcott" by the girl who sat next to me. Miss Scott was a lovely woman with a soft voice, soft white hair, blue eyes, and a gentle manner. As I remember, she wore only blue dresses. Sometimes when the sun shone through the high sashed windows Miss Scott would tilt and turn a crystal prism that hung on one of the shade pulls, thus casting a thousand rainbows around the dismal room. Occasionally she would give us permission to try to "catch'' the rainbows and that forbidding schoolroom was transfigured into a place of color and laughter as we darted and lunged after the reflections.

Despite my fears I did learn where to go and what to do, and I managed to grasp first-grade arithmetic. But, I used to think, I could never do it without Miss Scott. Well, I was not required to do it without Miss Scott. Miss Scott was the teacher. Miss Scott was there precisely to teach me what I needed to know. It has taken me a good many years to realize that in the School of Faith, what I am required to do I am enabled to do. Provision has been made. I am not alone and there is nothing to fear, for "God can be trusted not to allow you to suffer any temptation beyond your powers of endurance. He will see to it that every temptation has a way out, so that it will never be impossible for you to bear it."

Valerie's first schoolhouse was a thatched roof on six poles. It had neither walls nor floors. It had no desks, no chairs, no blackboards. It was an Indian house and her schoolbooks came by mail from the States, delivered to our jungle clearing in a small plane two or three times a month.

I, of course, was her teacher and it was a neat trick to hold her attention when Indian kids hung over her shoulder (What are you doing?), picked up her crayons (What are these?), scribbled in the textbooks (Let me try that), smelled the paper (This is made of wood), and pestered her continually to come and swim or fish or hunt for honey or fly wood bees on a length of thread. It was what Malcolm Muggeridge would call a "scandalously desultory" method of education, and when we had struggled through three years of this I decided it was time for some peer pressure and a little more order. We returned to the United States and Valerie started the fourth grade in a small-town public school in New Hampshire.

I had arranged to have the school bus pick her up, but as she stood at the bottom of the driveway on the first day of school in her new school dress holding her new lunch box (and I stood at the top of the driveway with tears in my eyes), the bus passed her by. Poor little girl, I thought, remembering my own terrors. But she was made of different stuff. I drove her to school and she ran in with a light wave of her hand. "Bye, Mama! I can find my room all right."

It did not dawn on her for a couple of weeks that the teacher was talking to her, and therefore expected her to listen. Because for three years she had had my undivided attention, she assumed that the teacher was addressing only the others. When she got this straightened out she did her work acceptably.

When she was in the fifth grade a classmate inquired as to "what kind of sex" she had had. I gave her a hug (and silently thanked God) when she told me her reply: "I won't answer a question like that."

In the seventh grade she copied an answer from someone else's test paper. In tears she confessed this to me, we talked about the sin of cheating, and I went with her to make it right with her teacher. I was unprepared for the teacher's response of self-vindication. Incredulous that a student would acknowledge such an offense, the teacher assumed at the outset that I had come to accuse her of negligence. It took several minutes before she understood that Valerie had come to say she was sorry and was willing to pay whatever penalty the teacher might set.

In the tenth grade she took a certain amount of ribbing because she wore skirts instead of blue jeans to school. "You mean your mother didn't make you? You really like skirts? Because what? You like being a girl?" She was some kind of nut. When there was only one dissenting vote (Valerie's) when the civics class agreed that the legal voting age should be reduced to sixteen she was asked for an explanation. "Well, I just don't think we know enough to vote." Incredulous stares. Some kind of nut again.

Valerie's little boy will not be starting school for three more years. I look at the children waiting for the school buses today and wonder what will be dished out to them. Will it be alternate cognitive modes, multithematic creativity programming, subjective time-distortion learning, disinhibiting emotional patterning, kinesthetic self-actualization? Or will they find a few people left in the schools who haven't discarded common sense along with wisdom and morality? Will they learn how to read, how to write a clear English sentence, how to add and subtract? Is there still the possibility that somebody, somewhere will teach them to distinguish right from wrong?

But today's newspaper reminds us that this would be inimical to democratic principle. Morality, usually called "value judgments" nowadays, has no place, we are told, in public-school education, least of all in public-school sex education. Words such as normal, ideal, masculinity, and femininity must be expunged from teachers' vocabularies lest they inhibit the freedom of elementary-school children to choose a life-style, e.g., asexual, bisexual, homosexual, or even heterosexual. These choices are to be made, it is assumed, without any reference whatsoever to ethical responsibility, let alone to religious principles, let alone to any divine design.

Life can be unpredictable, lonely, and fearsome, as I learned in Miss Dietz's and Miss Scott's classrooms, because, as I also learned there, sin has entered into the world. Lest our hearts quail as we "turn our children loose," let us remind ourselves of the nature of the warfare in which we engage: "not against any physical enemy; it is against the unseen power that controls this dark world, and spiritual agents from the very headquarters of evil. Take your stand then with truth as your belt . . . faith as your shield . . . pray at all times." The weapons must be appropriate to the foe.

A prayer written by Amy Carmichael has been my prayer as long as I have been a mother, and I pray it now for my grandchildren:

Father, hear us, we are praying,
Hear the words our hearts are saying,
We are praying for our children.

Keep them from the powers of evil
From the secret, hidden peril,
From the whirlpool that would suck them,
From the treacherous quicksand pluck them,
Holy Father, save our children.

From the worldling's hollow gladness,
From the sting of faithless sadness,
Through life's troubled waters steer them,
Through life's bitter battle cheer them,
Father, Father, be Thou near them.

Read the language of our longing,
Read the wordless pleadings thronging,
Holy Father, for our children.

And wherever they may bide,
Lead them Home at eventide.