One of the funny, odd, and even cool things about going to the temple is that you learn things you've known all along, but you learn them on a deeper level. You "get it" better than you did before, or you see that something you've always know is more important than you thought it was.
That last one is actually what happened to me last night.
My wife and I went with our ward to do sealings on assignment. As we were in there, listening to the ceremony, I just got overwhelmed with the Spirit and I suddenly realized just how connected the family is to everything in the Gospel. In fact, the family is at the very core of the Gospel. Everything that we do is related to our family. Our temporal family, our eternal family, our extended spiritual family. Everything comes back to that.
And everything about humanity is drawn from that core. Our relationships. Even our genders, sex and genetics. It all comes back to family.
We are all created into a big, vast spiritual family, as children of God. It's his purpose to bring about our exaltation. To that end, we're born into physical families. As a core part of bringing us back, those families need to be made eternal, and not just temporary.
The core of the family is the husband and the wife. Everything rests on them. The responsibility of bringing their family back to God is on their shoulders. That's why the sealing of the husband and wife is such a powerful ceremony. Pay attention to it the next time you do a sealing, and maybe you'll see the same epiphany I did.
OK, so I'm not doing badly as a husband and father, but I'm not doing my best, either. Bit by bit, I'll step it up, though.
Mark has a lifelong testimony of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon Church). Mark also has other sites and blogs, including MarkHansenMusic.com and his Dutch Oven blog.
Mark's Other Blog Posts: Martyrs and Anthems, Invoking the Mo'Boy Doctrine, Again, Dutch Oven Whole Wheat Bread
No comments:
Post a Comment