Mom

It's shocking to me how a simple conversation about nothing in particular with a person I love (and who loves me) can ease my burdens. It's just a simple conversation about the weather and a new dress, perhaps. Nothing more.

Not shocking to all who know me, emoding happiness isn't as natural as I perceive it to be for other people. I'm apt to feeling down and and am often relentlessly hard on myself. At night, I get pensive and somber. Tonight, in particular I was feeling that way: everything is changing in my life and so much is not what I imagined it to be. My mom had been trying to get a hold of me for the past couple of days and I decided, in spite of my sour mood, I'd give her a call back and check in. Of course I was reticent at the beginning of the conversation, but as it kept going I became completely engaged. We talked for more than 90 minutes and when I got off the phone I felt happy. No one can replace a mom. Isn't it funy how while growing up, you can search your house high and low for an hour in search of a lost valuable and as soon as Mom starts looking, she finds it. Counting Crows sings a song with lyrics that say "your mother recognizes all your desperate displays She watches as her babies drift violently away." Maybe I'm overly enamoured by their lyrics, but I think they communicate well a mom's insane intuition about her children.

When I went to Utah, there was a falling out between my mom and another sibling and I was around to hear the whole conversation. This sibling called me a week later to vent and find reassurance but it was all I could do to listen because I disagreed with the perspective she was taking on my mom. My mom isn't a plush comforter that blows sunshine.... and sometimes you wish she would. She's not a gentle wind, she's a bolt of lightning. And when she says something, she says it firmly.

A talk I was listening to during the week reminded me of her. It's Jeffrey R. Holland's Prayer for the Children. He comes down so unapologetically on undecided parents. The way he describes the commitment we ought to communicate to our children is how my mom is. She's not the parent being swept down the falls with the children; she's miles upstream shouting about the rapids ahead and the life-threatening falls to come.

Parents simply cannot flirt with skepticism or cynicism, then be surprised when their children expand that flirtation into full-blown romance. If in matters of faith and belief children are at risk of being swept downstream by this intellectual current or that cultural rapid, we as their parents must be more certain than ever to hold to anchored, unmistakable moorings clearly recognizable to those of our own household. It won’t help anyone if we go over the edge with them, explaining through the roar of the falls all the way down that we really did know the Church was true and that the keys of the priesthood really were lodged there but we just didn’t want to stifle anyone’s freedom to think otherwise.

Live the gospel as conspicuously as you can. Keep the covenants your children know you have made. Give priesthood blessings. And bear your testimony! Don’t just assume your children will somehow get the drift of your beliefs on their own. The prophet Nephi said near the end of his life that they had written their record of Christ and preserved their convictions regarding His gospel in order “to persuade our children . . . that our children may know . . . [and believe] the right way.”

Nephi-like, might we ask ourselves what our children know? From us? Personally? Do our children know that we love the scriptures? Do they see us reading them and marking them and clinging to them in daily life? Have our children ever unexpectedly opened a closed door and found us on our knees in prayer? Have they heard us not only pray with them but also pray for them out of nothing more than sheer parental love? Do our children know we believe in fasting as something more than an obligatory first-Sunday-of-the-month hardship? Do they know that we have fasted for them and for their future on days about which they knew nothing? Do they know we love being in the temple, not least because it provides a bond to them that neither death nor the legions of hell can break? Do they know we love and sustain local and general leaders, imperfect as they are, for their willingness to accept callings they did not seek in order to preserve a standard of righteousness they did not create? Do those children know that we love God with all our heart and that we long to see the face—and fall at the feet—of His Only Begotten Son? I pray that they know this.

Brothers and sisters, our children take their flight into the future with our thrust and with our aim. And even as we anxiously watch that arrow in flight and know all the evils that can deflect its course after it has left our hand, nevertheless we take courage in remembering that the most important mortal factor in determining that arrow’s destination will be the stability, strength, and unwavering certainty of the holder of the bow.