My little loves,
This is a talk given in church by Grandma Rhino. Since you are all going to read these someday I want you to know what a wonderful person your Grandmother is. She is one of the smartest, strongest, most wonderful people I know and I'm so lucky that she was also my mom. I hope you someday you can appriciate the strength that comes from both sides of your family.
Loving you,
Mom
This morning I have been asked to speak on strengthening families, in particular how parents can strengthen families. As with many things we are asked to do in the church, I do not have any special qualifications to speak on this topic except that I have been part of several families, the one I was raised in, the one I have helped raise, and the one I have joined through marriage. I did, when I was much younger, take a class in child development. I have forgotten much of what I learned there, but one thing has stayed with me. My professor made the statement that all of us should have the goal to become better parents than our parents were. At the time, being still a teenager, and not having realized the difficulties and complexities of raising children, I am sure I thought, "well, of course" and went over the list that most of us make while we are growing up of, "when I am a parent I am never going to say this or do this." I know on my list was I am never going to be angry with my children, and especially I will never yet at them. I will never make demeaning comments to them. I will always listen to them and never, ever argue with them. While all of these are worthy goals, I found they were much harder to do once you actually had children. Until, I had children, I thought I was a very patient person. In fact, sometimes at the end of especially trying days parenting our seven children, Jay and I would look at each other sigh, and say, "let's have seven more."
But there was also some things, even at the age of nineteen I knew that I wanted to be different in my home. At the top of that list was that I would have a temple marriage. Other things that would be different than the family I was raised in were that we would have family prayer, family home evening, attend church together, and keep the Sabbath day holy. In our family, we would put the Lord first.
I knew I wanted these things in my family because I did not have them while I was growing up. Like the Book of Mormon prophet Nephi, I was fortunate enough to be born of goodly parents. As I mentioned earlier, my parents were not perfect. It would probably be easy to go back and identify the mistakes they made in parenting. But they were and are good people, and I never doubted that they loved me. They too did not come from perfect families. In fact, my children point out that while on their father's side of the family stories include ones like Mary Elizabeth Rollins risking her life to save some of the pages of what was to become the doctrine of covenants from an angry mob, my memorable family stories, especially on my father's side of the family are just the opposite. It was my great-grandfather, who one day rode up on his horse, told his wife and thirteen children that he had gambled away his large ranch in the Uintah Mountains and rode off never to return. It was also an ancestor of my father's who not only divorced Brigham Young, but wrote a book about it and traveled across the country giving lectures on the evils of the Mormon faith. She came from a family who had sacrificed greatly for their Savior and for the church. She left a legacy of hatred that influenced generations. While in my father's immediate family, anti-Mormon sentiment prevailed, my father actually liked Mormons and even, to the chagrin of his family, married one.
My mother and father met shortly after the end of WWI. My Dad had been drafted in the Navy and my mother worked for the government administering VA benefits. My Dad was not only extremely handsome and an outstanding athlete, but a very good young man and they fell in love and were married by an LDS Bishop in a lovely yard one summer day. My mother once told me that she had thought that my father would join the church one day. And perhaps he would have, but she did not realize first of all, that when you marry someone, you to some extent marry their family, and secondly she underestimated the depth of my grandmother's hate for the LDS faith. In fact my grandmother had such strong feelings that just before she died, she made my father promise that he would never join the church. Consequently, I was born into a family where religion was simply not discussed, at least in front of the children. I have no memories of praying except for on the food when my mother's parents came to visit. We had a Bible, but it was only after my grandfather came to baptize me when I turned eight and gave me my own copy, do I even remember seeing a Book of Mormon. It was bright blue with the angel Moroni on it and I thought it was beautiful. My mother, my brothers, and I attended church sporadically when I was young and then pretty much stopped altogether.
For any of the youth who have stopped listening because this part is for you. At this point in your lives, the best way you can build a strong marriage is to choose your future spouse wisely. In the September 2011 Ensign, in an article entitled, "A little heaven on earth, Elder Robert D. Hales had this to say,
Single members of the Church often ask, “How do I find the right person to marry?” Let me suggest an approach. Measure the spiritual level of your potential future companions. First, if they are members of the Church, are they active and fully committed, or are they passive or antagonistic? Second, if they are not members, are they receptive to the gospel and its teachings, or are they noncommittal or antagonistic?
If you marry an active member in the temple for time and all eternity in the new and everlasting covenant, will you have problems? Yes. Will you be able to solve them? Yes. Will your chance be better to solve them and strengthen your testimony than if you had not married in the temple? Yes. But if you marry somebody who is antagonistic to the Church or passive toward the gospel, you are placing yourself in a position where you will find someday that you may have to choose between that individual and the Church. That is a very heavy responsibility.
When you are choosing your companion, make sure that both of you have a desire for a celestial marriage relationship, a desire to have a companion for eternity, a desire to have a family for eternity, and a desire to live in the presence of our Heavenly Father.
I love both of my parents dearly and I can't say what their conversations on religion were before they were married, but I knew then and I know now that I wanted a home that was Christ centered and the home I was raised in was devoid of religion.
My father loved sports and any void that was felt from a lack of religion in our home was filled with football, basketball, and baseball. He coached all three sports at one time or another. We lived and breathed sports and two of my brothers went on to play football in college. In fact, one time my husband started a talk in church about how my family belonged to the church of the NFL.
But one day when I was 10 or 11 something happened to change my life. A member of the church picked me up and took me to Primary. I remember walking into the chapel and seeing a picture of Christ in the front with the caption, "Come Follow Me" written beneath. It seems to me that someone was even playing the corresponding hymn on the piano. I felt the Spirit of the Holy Ghost and knew that I too wanted to follow my Savior. I knew that I wanted the gospel part of my life. Everything that I learned about the gospel, from prophets and priesthood to temples, I learned from my ward family and I will forever be grateful to them.
For years, I knew the bittersweet feeling of attending church by yourself with no family to sit with. And for years I found the message that families can be together forever, beautiful, but also somewhat sad. I decided that I would be married in the temple and sealed to my family forever.
Several weeks ago, Bro. Zavonivich spoke of how hard it was to tell his parents that they would not be able to attend his sealing.
I understood.
When I was in high school, in one of the few times, we discussed the church, my father told me that I could go to church all I wanted, but I was his only daughter, that he wanted to give my away and that I couldn't get married in the temple.
But because I had made a comment to put the Lord first in my life, I knew that I needed to have a temple marriage.
I met Jay when I was still quite young, almost 20.
He was just barely off his mission and after a lot of prayer and fasting, we were married in the Salt Lake temple.
My parents were unhappy.
They said I was too young, we would be very poor, and in one of the most desperate attempts I have heard in preventing a marriage, my mother said that Jay and I shouldn't marry because Jay and I had very different jaw structures and all of our children would have to have braces.
We did it anyway.
They were right about just of all those things, we were very young and we spent many years very poor, but only half of our children had braces.
My mother said there was no point in their driving from California to Utah since they couldn't attend the wedding, but on the day I was married they were waiting outside the temple.
I said earlier, I never doubted that my parents loved me, and looking back, I never saw a greater example of their love than when they waited for me outside of the temple that day.
My mother later said she knew everything would be okay when she saw how happy I was I.
So I had my temple wedding, but it was just the beginning.
I could now do all those other things that were on my list and we did not do them perfectly.
My children can tell you that I was not always patient and sometimes I said things I regretted.
They all remember the night I completely lost patience, walked out of family home evening and left the house.
But we continued to put the Lord first, forgive each other, work together, and have a lot of fun.
Elder Hales continued in that same article:
Temple marriage describes the place you go to have a marriage performed. Celestial marriage is what you create by being true to the sacred covenants you make during the temple marriage ceremony.
After the vows are taken, a celestial marriage requires living a consecrated life of worthiness and celestial principles, which leads to happiness in this life and exaltation in the next. If we live the laws pertaining to celestial marriage, we will, with our spouse and with our family, be able to have a little heaven on earth. And when we live those laws, we are practicing the same laws that are practiced in heaven. We are practicing how to live with the Father and the Son and with our families in the eternities to come. That to me is the message to the world of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I want to bear you my testimony that we can be better parents than our parents were. I tell my married children to take the best from both of their families and let the rest go. I know that Heavenly Father loves and knows each of his children. More than, once when I have knelt in heartfelt prayer about problems facing my individual children, I have had the thought that He not only knew them better than I did, but loved them more than I do too.
I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
