The Family: A
Proclamation to the World, issued by the First Presidency of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1995, is about the divine nature of each
human being, the correct use of sexual drive, the claim that families are the
ideal institution for nurturing human happiness and growth, and the call to
governments to value and support that institution.
QUICK OVERVIEW--Read along here.
Paragraph One: Marriage
is divinely mandated; family is everything!
Paragraph Two:
Every human being is a child of God and is deeply loved—full stop! Our gender
is important and eternal.
Paragraph Three: We
participated in God’s plan for our growth willingly. Families can be forever
through authorized temple covenants.
Paragraph Four:
The mission of Adam and Eve was to become parents. That is still our mandate
Paragraph five: Sex
between a married man and woman is sacred and is divinely appointed. Life is
sacred.
Paragraph six: Once
a family is formed, the spouses are divinely obligated to love and care for
each other. Once this family adds children, the parents are mandated to rear
them in love and teach them what is right. Guidelines for this are given.
Paragraph seven: The
institution of the family is divine. Children are entitled to a loving family
with parents of both genders. Families achieve greater happiness the more they follow
the teachings of Jesus Christ. Fathers and mothers have different focuses of
responsibility according to their gender. Guidelines for this are given.
Paragraph eight:
Those who participate in sex outside of marriage or who abuse family members
will have to account to God for disrupting the divine nature of the family.
Paragraph nine: It
is imperative that governments recognize and strengthen family as the
fundamental unit of society.
THE IDEAL FOR
FAMILIES
The Proclamation
to the World declares the truth about individual worth and about gender. It
states the ideals for sexual relations, marriage, family, and
government support. I love that clarity! That vision of perfection!
THE TRUTH ABOUT
FAMILIES
Life outside the
Garden is a mess. It is saturated with opposition. Opposition creates
confusion. Mortality is not an easy place to live! In fact, let me step back
and say that life inside the Garden was a little messy, too!
In the first three
of the six accounts of the Creation found in the Old Testament and the Pearl of
Great Price, the very first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve was to
become parents.
“So God created
man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female
created he them. And God blessed them [married them?], and God said unto them,
Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth…” (Genesis 1:27-28; Moses
2:27-28; Abraham 4:27-28).
It’s interesting
that all other Christian religions (that I’m aware of) skip over this primary
commandment and consider the command to shun the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
as the all-important one.
Without knowledge,
Adam and Eve could not become parents. They had been given two commandments and
could only keep one of them. They had to choose which one to keep.
Eve realized that
the most important commandment was the first: to gain the knowledge/ability to have
children and open the door to mortality for all the children of God. Once Eve made
this choice, Adam had to choose between two opposing commandments: whether to honor
his marriage covenant with Eve and join her in taking the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge or whether to honor the commandment to stay safely in the Garden of
Eden by himself.
Side note: Each of
these three books of scripture has a second account of the Creation in the following
chapter. In these accounts the commandment to not eat the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge is the first one (Genesis 2:15-16, Moses 3:15-16, and Abraham 5:11-13)
and is given to Adam before Eve appears. However, the point is the same: one
commandment must be broken in order to keep the other one.
Even from
Premortal Life, life for God’s children has been a matter of choosing what is best
from a selection of messy offerings. If we chose to follow Satan and guarantee
perfection, we chose to give up agency and growth. If we chose to jump into our
Heavenly Father’s plan for mortality, we chose to run into every kind of
opposition and temptation and snare and would have to rely wholly upon Jesus
Christ to save us. but we would grow!
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If we choose to follow Adam and Eve’s example, we choose to marry and give up our focus on self. If we have children, as we covenant to do in a temple sealing, we give up our honeymoon as a couple and choose joy and sorrow, sacrifice and reward, love and loss, but we also choose the way of greatest growth. To truly sacrifice for another’s spiritual growth is to love as Jesus Christ loved. It is the “more perfect way” mentioned at the end of 1 Cor. 12, which is the link to 1 Cor. 13 (Paul didn’t divide up the chapters). The ”more perfect way” of pure love is the messy way! It is the way that will hurt and will heal! It is the way that will crush and will thrill! In families, we start with the joy of romance or the sweetness of a newborn, the fun of new marriage or the delight of a toddler's laughter.
But before long, things get hard.
Or maybe they were hard to start with for us: Maybe we didn’t even get to know one or both of our parents at all. The streets and orphanages of many countries in the world are filled with children of God without “parents kind and dear,” as Primary children sweetly sing. One of our children experienced that life before we adopted her. (I sang "I Am a Child of God" in Russian to her as soon as we met.)
Maybe we had parents, but they were neither “kind” nor “dear.” We
parented the sweetest teenage girl for 4 years who had experienced this kind of
childhood for 15 years before she moved into our ward and then lost her last semi-functional
parent to jail.
Still The Proclamation to the World guides us through the mess. It guides us to “love and care for” our family members, right where we are. Sometimes loving and caring for family members may mean removing oneself from their abuse, because they cannot progress as long as they are able to manipulate and control. Sometimes it may involve seek professional help to learn to be the exact opposite of one's own parents, which is what our sweet teen has done with her own family.
Sometimes
it may involve letting children experience the consequences of their
actions. I once had a clear message come into my brain when I was trying to prevent a child from making a terrible mistake: “You are preventing [them] from
experiencing the consequences of [their] actions.” I stepped back and relaxed into faith in God. The consequences of their
actions were hard, but they learned from them, day by day, and drew closer to
Christ because they needed His help. In the end, those consequences provided the greatest joy [they] could have experienced.
It may be that our choices or another's will land us in an imperfect family situation. We may become a single parent with no support from the other parent. We can still follow the guidance of The Proclamation and claim our “sacred duty to rear [our] children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, and to teach them to love and serve…”
I
have a dear friend who had two children from her daycare dropped into her lap
when their parents were ruled unfit by a judge. She was the adult they knew best, so she took them into her home, became a
registered foster parent, and worked towards reunification for two years. When the parents' rights were permanently revoked, she went to the temple with the question, knowing she could not have these children sealed to
her because she had no husband. The message Heavenly Father gave her was to become
their mother. They had spent two years with her, they could face no more disruption,
she was the best mother they had.
Perhaps we never get to start a family of our own. Marriage never comes, or it does but divorce follows quickly. Then we paraphrase The Proclamation: “Happiness in [single] life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful [homes] are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities..." We look around ourselves and find people we can love and serve who are members of our eternal family--other children of God. Sometimes the perfect person for loving an individual or family that has lots of needs is a single person. How many families benefitted from the service of President Russell M. Nelson's second wife, Wendy in the decades before she was married? She was an esteemed family therapist although she was single.
No matter the situation, the imperative is to love, because that
will make us like Christ and unite us as a divine family with God.
“…that is the only
purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love – but to persist in
love.” –Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
It’s not a
scripture but it’s true.
And that’s what The Proclamation is all about: the grand purpose of human life.
The love of Jesus Christ for His Father and for us caused Him the greatest pain anyone on this earth has ever experienced! How do we expect to become like Him without loving through pain? Yet, when He had completed that excruciating act of love, and he witnessed the product of that love in the Nephites, His joy was greater than it had ever been!
“And now, behold, my joy is great, even unto fulness, because of you, and also this generation; yea, and even the Father rejoiceth, and also all the holy angels…” (3 Nephi 27:30).
P.S. If you are in a messy family (and if you’re not yet, you likely will be someday) or if you are loving and serving another messy family, I highly recommend this life-changing presentation by Joseph Grenny, the founder of the highly successful addiction recovery program in the Western United States, The Other Side Academy: "The Honest Truth About Messy Families."
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