Sharing and Defending - "The Family - A Proclamation to the World"

Hello my dear family –

This is my very last semester of school.  Hooray!  An elective class I’m taking, FAML 100, focuses on principles from “The Family – A Proclamation to the World”.  The main project for that course that I chose involves sharing with all of you what I’m learning.  I chose to do it in this format on this blog.

We all know how under attack marriage and family are.  In Take Back Your Marriage: Sticking Together in a World that Pulls Us Apart, by William Doherty, a book I studied in another class, he discusses the importance of being intentional in our marriages today.  I feel this is so true.  Even for me and Dad, married almost 40 years.  We still have to be aware and intentional in the practices that help our marriage thrive.

We are blessed with a foundational document, the proclamation, that clarifies the importance of marriage and families and more importantly the centrality marriage and family are in our Father’s plan.  I like what Jared recently taught me when we were discussing gays and the Mormon culture.  Jared said that we need to teach our children that in order to be like our Heavenly Father, we need to desire to live in the family unit and to be heterosexual like our Father is.  God’s plan is not for us to glorify Him so much as it is to bring happiness to us.  And we know that happiness comes from being in a family.

To share and defend the principles in “The Family – A Proclamation to the World” I need to be an example of one who is happily married and who is open about the effort I take to make my marriage so.  I need to remind others I meet how our greatest joys, mine and theirs, are found with family relationships.  I may still defend the principles in the proclamation in a non-sectarian way, because of research I’ve studied and evidences I’ve learned.  And even if we don’t know the research data, we can still connect with others when we mention family relationships because we’re all children of God.

One lesson that recently distilled upon me came to me in the temple.  Although this may not completely coincide with defending the principles of the proclamation, I felt to share it with you anyway. 

I think partly due to the way my father led in my home growing up, and partly due to some of my misunderstandings about the role of women, I often just let your dad make all the decisions.  I yielded to him in many things.  Some of it may have been because I spent so many years pregnant and nursing a baby.  He was trying to lighten my load.  But that was a cop-out, unfair to him and to me.   Thankfully he is a man who has never exercised unrighteous dominion and who has constantly kept a completely unselfish perspective.  So there was equity in our lives.  But so often when there were decisions or issues with the children or financial things, or whatever the questions or concerns may have been, I just let him decide.  I burdened him unnecessarily and I limited my growth.  It really wasn’t until he was called as bishop that I began to more fully take a proactive approach in our marriage and family.  I grew more in my abilities and became more “equally yoked”.  My previous patterns may have been a disservice to you older girls.

Thankfully that is changed in the last several years.  It’s another evidence to me that relationships evolve, marriage is a growing and living entity.  Old and unhealthy patterns can be broken.  As I shared from Marion’s funeral, the Savior and His enabling power through His grace and atonement can heal any problem and it’s worth every effort. 

Thanks for letting me share.  I love you all.