Dear Children

My hopes is that someday this blog serves as a journal. Maybe a tool to help you understand your mother's strengths, and her weaknesses. But always at the center of my strivings, is to be a steward over you in your progression on this earth until you are accountable unto yourself. Sometimes I don't do such a good job, I'm sure you'll be quick to tell me when your brains have developed with so much worldly knowledge- but no filter for it all yet. But I strive to magnify this calling of my life so that someday you can look back in hindsight and understand my heart.



I fear for you in this world, though it grows strange all around us, and distances the will of our Heavenly Father for his children. I guess every generation of mothers think the same thing, and the later generation of mothers look back at previous worries thinking that might have been easier. But as I think about the pioneer mothers who believed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ being restored to the earth, enduring the persecution, being driven from their homes, and trecking thousands of miles across the country for safety to worship our Heavenly Father, I alway said I wouldn't have had enough faith to do it. My heart aches when I think of those mothers burying their children along their journey, never to visit their graves again. Or those mothers dying and leaving their children to face the physical trials required of that people to build up a gospel on the face of the earth once again.



Some say that this generation bears the spiritual burden of being pioneers and being steadfast in our faith. And at times I feel strengthened to continue to carry on the work. And other times I feel persecution. When the world calls religion 'close minded' or bigotry, it's a challenge. I want you to know that to live a different choice is not close minded, but rather single minded with our eye single to the glory of our Heavenly Father.



Our nation which was established for freedom of religion, and the choices it encompasses, is changing many things which are deep rooted with religious tradition. The family foundation is being challenged by determining the technicalities of what makes a family. Of what makes a marriage.



Our church leaders have said this:

"The first commandment that God gave to Adam and Eve pertained to their potential for parenthood as husband and wife. We declare that God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force. We further declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.
We declare the means by which mortal life is created to be divinely appointed. We affirm the sanctity of life and of its importance in God’s eternal plan."

As you continue to grow and experience this mortal existence in your journey as a spiritual child of our Heavenly Father, I want you to be stregnthened by my testimony in this principle. It isn't a matter of equality, or agency, which I believe we all are entitled to because we chose the plan of Salvation which provided a Savior to us. But it is a matter of conforming unto God, not unto the world. To be told that it is best to be progressive, insinuates that you must ride the wave of liberated traditions becoming individualized, and also minimalized.

It doesn't matter to me if I'm progressive. It matters to me if I'm worthy for the work. I prayed for each of you, and I promised my Heavenly Father that if he trusted me with his most precious, I would teach them about him, and their purpose coming to this earth.

Your purpose is to be tested. To fail, to succeed, to learn the lessons that it is going to take for you to be worthy of your divine destiny as a child of our Heavenly Father, created in his image, blessed to have an eternal family someday, and continue to progress eternally.

So someday as you go out in this world, I pray that you don't brush off the values I try to teach you as something old fashioned or foolish. I hope that you grow to love your individualities, and qualities that are fore-ordained in your roles, specific to the gender of which you were created. Our Heavenly Father does not make mistakes, but sometimes he is misunderstood. To mistake is human, and to overcome this mortality learning all that we needed, is what it is all about.