Recently my husband and I went to a popular fast-food restaurant with two other couples and six of their preschool-to-fourth-grade children and grandchildren. While the adults stood in line for the food, the children sat together at the tables. They were quiet and compatible—but I saw the fourth-grader, Robert, look worried when the other children started to play with the salt and pepper shakers and attempt to make pyramids out of them. He came over to speak with his dad for a moment. Then, without fuss or words, Robert simply gathered up the salt and pepper shakers and placed them on a table away from the other children.
What interested me was that the children accepted Robert's action without resistance and behaved themselves admirably during the entire visit, even though the adults sat at tables separate from the children throughout a leisurely meal. Robert hadn't taken charge of the children. Clearly, they were expressing a measure of self-government. Knowing these parents and grandparents as I do, I felt certain something less observable was going on also. Because it is their daily practice to turn to the authority of our heavenly Father in prayer, it seemed natural for them to feel and respond to His guidance right there in the restaurant, and for the children to respond to the same divine influence.
For me, the incident illustrated the fact that man derives authority from a higher power than himself. Even Christ Jesus never sought to exercise authority apart from God. One time, when Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath day, the Jews wanted to know what gave him the authority to do that. The Bible records Jesus as replying, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." When they then sought to kill him because they believed he was claiming to be equal with God, Jesus explained, "The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." John 5:17–20. Jesus placed himself always under God's authority and expected his followers to do the same. He knew that his success in healing, and ours, depended entirely upon humble subordination to the divine Mind.
