The families in our little Spanish-language branch in Brigham City have Problems (and I type that with a capital "P").All families struggle, of course. Trials and tribulations come and go.
But the gravity of the grief in the branch can be heartbreaking. Last Sunday, I hauled out my scriptures and we took a long look at the families in the Bible to see what we could learn.I remember a woman once telling me that her family put the "fun" in the word "dysfunctional." But those Bible families didn't seem to be having much fun.There was the Adam and Eve family — where one of the children murdered his brother. Nobody in the branch had been down that road. Then there was Abraham's family, where the father had to choose between two mothers and two sons. The branch had luckily sidestepped that one, too. The family of Jacob sold a brother into slavery and then claimed he'd been killed. Ugly stuff, that. Apart from the Bible, members of Lehi's family spent their lives at each other's throats — literally. Even the family of Joseph Smith ended up scattered.And yet we honor and revere those families.
We hold them in high esteem. They are the elite families of the scriptures.
Why?
Why do we do that?
Those families went through more devastation than New Orleans.Over time, I've decided it comes down to how we define our families. If we identify with our failings, we will be a family of failure. And we will see other families as failures. But if we identify with our potential and the desires of our hearts, we become families of hope.
We remember Lehi and Sariah fondly — not because they had wayward sons — but because they stayed the course. They didn't cower.In short, they stayed faithful.
And today, we revere that faith, not their failings. The same for Adam and Eve, Abraham and all the others.As families, we should not define ourselves by all our troubled members, but by our hopes and aspirations.As long as the parents hold, the family won't fly apart — no matter how far some of the sons and daughters may stray. Faithful parents are like the falconers in the Yeats poem. They remain fixed in the middle. Things only fly apart when the parents stop trying.That, I think, is why we take inspiration from biblical families and their ordeals. Not because they conquered their devils, but because they held firm under assault.
And that's a lesson, I think, all families — Spanish-speaking,
English-speaking, even non-speaking — need to learn and re-learn as we
inch along.