I was asked to speak in church the other day about how to raise a righteous family. I was very grateful for this topic. This is obviously something that I have been thinking a lot about over the last couple of years but this assignment forced me to focus my ponderings.
As each parent realizes rather quickly we cannot force our children to make all of the right choices (I am beginning to relate to Heavenly Father already). I knew before Evan and Emma were born that my job as their mother is to help them acquire the tools they will need to make good choices on their own. Okay this is not a new revelation. However I have now pin pointed ten tools that I feel are essential to my children's eternal happiness.
1. The ability to recognize and follow the spirit
2. Knowledge of and more importantly a relationship with Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ
3. Knowledge that they and every person around them is of divine origin and has a divine purpose
4. Be filled with a desire to know and follow truth
5. Have an unquenchable desire to serve, learn and teach
6. Be self-reliant and to value hard work
7. Desire to use their gift of agency for righteous purposes
8. A love of family
9. Moral courage to stand for righteousness - integrity
10. Ability to see beauty and goodness in the world around them - The condition of society is bleak and our children are growing up in a world of incredible challenges. I feel strongly that we must teach our children of the good and beauty and virtue which is still abundant in the world. These virtuous and beautiful things need to be more attractive to our children then the delusions that the world offers.
What an awesome responsibility. It is easy to forget this goal in the busyness of everyday life. The laundry, dishes, meals, the cleaning and doing. The playing and the reading. The hugging and the disciplining.......perhaps it is not forgotten at all, but is in these everyday things that these tools are forged. Thank God for heavenly help in this most important work.
3 comments:
I love this post. I think I may print it and hang it up in my room to remind me of my duty as mother. Elizabeth, in case you don't know, I really look up to you, and I think you are an amazing mother. Love you!
Wish I could have heard you talk at church. It sounds like it was a great topic for sacrament. We had so much fun picking strawberries with you this morning. I hope we didn't wear you out! :)
Beautiful, and so true! I'm so glad we have a deep thinker in the family.
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