fatherhood

Commandments are loving counsel from a wise Father. Our understanding and concept of God as a loving and personal Heavenly Father allows us no other definition. He gives us commandments for one reason only-because he loves us and wants us to be happy.

Nobody ever says to men, how can you be a Congressman and a father.

The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.

It is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.

No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.

Does faith begin to fail . . . ? Say not the Father hath not heard your prayer; You shall have your desire, sometime, somewhere.

Today our youth are faced with tremendous challenges-and what do they need most? They need sound knowledge, sensible understanding, a guiding hand. They need real homes that are maintained in a clean and orderly manner. They need fathers who are really fathers and mothers who are mothers in the true sense of the word. They need more than mere progenitors or landlords. They are in need of loving, understanding parents, who give fatherly and motherly care, who put their families first in their lives, and who consider it their fundamental and most important duty to save their children, to so orient them and their thinking that they will not be swayed by every wind of persuasion which happens to blow in their direction.

It is one of the great ironies of human history that some mortals with incorrect understanding of God and life's purposes sometimes scold God because of the abundance of human misery and suffering-which, indeed, lies all about us. Such individuals almost dare God to demonstrate His existence by straightening things out-and at once! But He is a much different kind of Father than that. Surely it is requisite to eternal life that we come to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent (see John 17:3).

The submissive will make it through to that final scene, for the word of God will lead the man and woman of Christ "in a straight and narrow course across that everlasting gulf of misery . . . and land their souls . . . at the right hand of God in the kingdom, to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and with Jacob, and with all our holy fathers" (Helaman 3:30) "who have been ever since the world began . . . to go no more out." (Alma 7:25)

Yet, seeing this ingratitude of those who are without perspective should not cause us to make reflexive rejoinders to unbelievers. Rather, we, for our part, ought to contemplate how truly deep God's commitment to free agency must be, how truly deep (and unpossessive) his love for his children must be to allow us to err, to fail, to learn, and to grow. And how wonderful is his refusal to impose, by his power, a faith that otherwise seems to come so slowly and to so few when men are left free. Sensing, even on such a small scale, these divine commitments ought to help us to reflect them in our lives. If we are tempted to unwise responses because of our small-scale frustrations with those who are ungrateful, with those who misuse their gifts, lo, how much greater the sense of disappointment at the divine level is. And yet his commitment to free agency remains intact, and his love, justice, and mercy continue even for those who defy their Father.