“Homes are more permanent through love. Oh, then, let love abound. Though you fall short in some material matters, study and work and pray to hold your children’s love. Establish and maintain your family hours always. Stay close to your children. Pray, play, work, and worship together.”
(President David O. McKay, 1968)
President David O. McKay was the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints several decades ago. He particularly pertinent in today’s world.
How happy I am when I visit a place and see parents parenting in love. Children are so tender. And when children err, it is rarely through defiance. Instead, when children make mistakes they do so not in spite, but simply (and usually) out of curiosity or lack of inhibition.
How pleased the Lord must be when He sees parents who recognize the innocence of childhood and parent accordingly. This is why I love this quote above from one of our previous Mormon prophets.
What President McKay stated is so true. Our homes do become more permanent organizations when love abounds. Yet so much of the opposite exists. There is too much of yelling in today’s world. There is too much of tempers being lost, of unkind words being flung. Oh, how the Lord must weep when He sees some of us acting much like that two-year-old ourselves.
And yet there is no need to lose hope when we ourselves have misbehaved or acted out in frustration (much like a frustrated toddler). No, instead if we follow the prophet’s counsel above, soon enough we will begin to see progress in our abilities to parent as the Lord would if He were here in our stead.
So what did President David O. McKay say? He said that “though you fall short in some material matters, study and work and pray to hold your children’s love…”
Study. Work. Pray. What profound truths. And what better book to study for parents than that of the scriptures. In fact, what about this idea? What if the next time we felt short-tempered with our children, what if we put OURSELVES in time-out? And what if during that time out, we read the “good book” itself, the scriptures? Indeed, by studying in the scriptures we are much more likely to find a way to resolve the problem at hand.
As the prophet said:
“Establish and maintain your family hours always. Stay close to your children. Pray, play, work, and worship together….”
There are some profound and powerful truths contained within those simply statements. May we all begin discovering those truths, myself included, on a deeper and deeper basis. The Lord Himself will be most pleased as we join the ranks of parents who please Him and who act like Him, merciful even during the most discouraging times of trouble. This way our homes will indeed become more permanent through love.
