For the parent who fears a child has been deprived of God by a change of routine.
It's about two feet across, drawn in yellow and orange chalk on the concrete by the garage door, with rays going out unevenly because she ran out of yellow halfway round.
She did it on Saturday. It rained on Sunday night and most of it's gone now, except the bottom left, which was under the eaves and survived.
What you keep coming back to is what she said while she was drawing it. She was on her knees with chalk on her shins and she said, without looking up, that God made the actual one and hers was a copy.
Nobody taught her that. She's never sat in a service. She's six, she has no formal instruction of any kind behind her, and she announced it the way children announce whatever they assume everybody knows.
You stood there with a cup of tea and felt two entirely opposite emotions at once. You have been circling the second one ever since, which is the fear that she got that on her own because nobody has been giving her anything.
The heavens declare His glory, and that declaring has never once stopped over your house. Scripture's psalm was written about a sky that speaks without a messenger, and the Spirit makes it land on a six year old with chalk on her shins.
The Fear Under the Chalk
Name what actually moved in you, because it wasn't guilt exactly.
It was closer to alarm. She said something true about God and you hadn't put it there, which meant that for a moment you couldn't account for her. Where did that come from, and what else is she working out on her own? Is she assembling something in there with no help from anybody?
Underneath that sits an assumption worth dragging into daylight. You have been carrying the idea that a child is empty until instructed, and that every true thing in her has to have been placed by a curriculum somebody designed.
That isn't how the book describes it and it isn't how children behave. She got it from the sky, which had been saying the same sentence over her every clear day of her life.
Children aren't containers waiting to be filled by an approved supplier. They're awake, they're surrounded, and a great deal reaches them before any adult gets round to arranging anything.
She was answered before she was taught, never the other way round. The written Word's psalm as written says the heavens declare His glory continually, and the Spirit makes that declaration land on a driveway.
The Heavens Were Already Talking
Here's the verse, and what matters is how little human effort appears anywhere in it.
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.Psalm 19:1 (KJV)
Declare. Present tense, continuous, with no messenger named and no instruction given to anybody. The sky does this whether the household is religious, whether anyone's watching, whether it happens to be a Sunday.
The psalm goes on to say there's no speech or language where their voice isn't heard, which is a large claim and the psalmist makes it without qualification.
Those words were first written by a king with a temple down the road, and they arrive on a driveway without narrowing. The declaring was never dependent on the temple, and it isn't dependent on your Sunday either.
Your daughter is being spoken to by a sky that has never once stopped. Scripture's psalm as written says the heavens declare God's glory with no schedule behind it, and the Spirit makes that speech audible to a child.
What You Actually Gave Her
Say what you did that you aren't counting, because you have been auditing only what you failed to do.
You gave her a household where God gets mentioned on a Saturday without anybody going quiet. That isn't nothing. Most children learn very early which subjects make a room change temperature, and yours has clearly not learned that about this one.
That lesson is taught without words and it's almost impossible to undo. A child who has watched one parent go still at the mention of a subject will carry the stillness for thirty years.
You'll have met adults who can't say the word God in a room without lowering their voice by a third. Nobody sat them down and taught them that. They absorbed it from a kitchen before they were nine.
She said it without looking up, with no pause and no checking your face first, and no small performance aimed at a parent's approval. She said it the way she would have told you the chalk was running out.
You built a house where she can say it without checking your face, and that came from you. The written Word puts the talking in the ordinary hours of a household, and the Spirit has been working through an atmosphere you didn't know you were making.
I Am Not Promising You How She Turns Out
Be straight, because a message that guaranteed an outcome would be dishonest and you'd know it by next spring.
I can't tell you what your daughter will believe at nineteen. She has her own will, nobody gets to hand you a result, and any message that did would be trading on your fear.
Nor am I saying a room full of other children would do nothing for her. It might do a great deal. If one becomes right for your household, take it without a backward glance at any of this.
What I'm taking off you is the word deprived. Not the wanting more for her. Not the alarm on the driveway.
She Was Not Working It Out Alone
The turn here is about who else was on the driveway with her.
You have been picturing her assembling something by herself, unsupervised, with nobody helping, which is what made the alarm rise in the first place. A child building a theology out of chalk and guesswork.
She wasn't alone. The psalm says the heavens declare, which means somebody was speaking to her the entire time she was drawing, and had been speaking every clear day since she was born.
She wasn't reaching a conclusion without help. She was answering something. The sky said it first, a six year old on her knees said it back, and you happened to be standing there with a cup of tea when it happened.
She was answering rather than inventing, because the sky had already spoken to her. The written Word's psalm as written makes that declaring continual and universal, and the Spirit carried it to a child before you had arranged anything.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
This rests on His finished work rather than on your condition today. He lives in you, the Spirit carries the words, and the outcome is left in the hands that arranged the whole thing.
Speak the whole of it and let it stand.
The heavens declare His glory, and that declaring has never once stopped over this house. Scripture says that the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handywork, with no messenger named anywhere in it. The Spirit carried that to a six year old on a driveway before I had arranged anything at all. I am not her only source. She was answering rather than inventing, and the ease she said it with came from a house where God gets mentioned on a Saturday. I give the outcome to God and put the word deprived down.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Psalm 19:1
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
