"It is a great challenge to raise a
family in the darkening mists of our moral environment.
"We emphasize that the greatest work you
will do will be within the walls of your home (see Harold B. Lee,
Ensign, July 1973, p. 98), and that “no other success can compensate
for failure in the home” (David O. McKay, Improvement Era, June
1964, p. 445).
"The measure of our success as parents,
however, will not rest solely on how our children turn out. That
judgment would be just only if we could raise our families in a
perfectly moral environment, and that now is not possible.
"It is not uncommon for responsible
parents to lose one of their children, for a time, to influences
over which they have no control. They agonize over rebellious sons
or daughters. They are puzzled over why they are so helpless when
they have tried so hard to do what they should.
"It is my conviction that those wicked
influences one day will be overruled.
“'The Prophet Joseph Smith declared—and
he never taught a more comforting doctrine—that the eternal sealings
of faithful parents and the divine promises made to them for valiant
service in the Cause of Truth, would save not only themselves, but
likewise their posterity. Though some of the sheep may wander, the
eye of the Shepherd is upon them, and sooner or later they will feel
the tentacles of Divine Providence reaching out after them and
drawing them back to the fold. Either in this life or the life to
come, they will return. They will have to pay their debt to justice;
they will suffer for their sins; and may tread a thorny path; but if
it leads them at last, like the penitent Prodigal, to a loving and
forgiving father’s heart and home, the painful experience will not
have been in vain. Pray for your careless and disobedient children;
hold on to them with your faith. Hope on, trust on, till you see the
salvation of God.' (Orson F. Whitney, in Conference Report, Apr.
1929, p. 110.)
"We cannot overemphasize the value of
temple marriage, the binding ties of the sealing ordinance, and the
standards of worthiness required of them. When parents keep the
covenants they have made at the altar of the temple, their children
will be forever bound to them. President Brigham Young said:
“'Let the father and mother, who are
members of this Church and Kingdom, take a righteous course, and
strive with all their might never to do a wrong, but to do good all
their lives; if they have one child or one hundred children, if they
conduct themselves towards them as they should, binding them to the
Lord by their faith and prayers, I care not where those children go,
they are bound up to their parents by an everlasting tie, and no
power of earth or hell can separate them from their parents in
eternity; they will return again to the fountain from whence they
sprang.'” (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, comp. Bruce
R. McConkie, 3 vols., 2:90-91.)
© 2001 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.
Ensign, May 1992, 66.
