Home to Mother and Father

I had a lovely Mother's Day yesterday (I say this in all seriousness) where we couldn't find Clementine's Sunday shoes—her only shoes—and ran harriedly all over the house and yard looking for them until we finally put Gus's two-sizes-too-big BB-8-8 tennis shoes on her and were late to church anyway—and Ziggy wore his new Sunday pants decorated thus in permanent marker:

I admit to feeling annoyed and flustered as we sat down for sacrament meeting, barely in time for Malachi to go up and give the opening prayer, but in his prayer he expressed gratitude for our Heavenly Mother, and it immediately brought me back to a sense of awe and gratitude for this role of mother I get to play in our family.

I had talked about Heavenly Mother for our home church lesson during breakfast, telling the children how much I love the doctrine of Heavenly Parents and how grateful I am to know that "I've a mother there." And after Malachi's prayer, I sat in church reflecting on the things I have come to feel certain are some of Heavenly Mother's gifts to Her children: first, the peace and stillness that comes over me sometimes when I am completely exhausted and spent and pleading for help, the peace that feels like an echo of my earliest memories of being safe and nourished and comforted in my mother's arms. And second, the "longing for home" that seems to be within all God's children—knowing the role Heavenly Mother must have played in creating a heavenly home worth longing for and returning to.

I gave a talk in church a few weeks ago where I explored some thoughts about this longing for home, and I guess I'll put it here because it connects with so many of the things I believe and wish I could share about the sacredness of a woman's role as nurturer and homemaker. It's more than just cultural tradition, it's more than "patriarchy"—it's the most profound blessing and responsibility I can think of: to take on the role of creator and nurturer in an earthly home that reaches toward heaven, so as to to point those I love in the direction of our Father and Mother's home.

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I’m going to start with two stories about gifts.

1. When our son Ziggy was four years old, he was really into power tools and pretending to be a worker. So for Christmas, we got him a real leaf blower and a toy chainsaw. His older brother Teddy was six, and he knew the leaf blower was real, so when Zig opened up the chainsaw Teddy got just the most dubious look on his face. You could tell he wanted to say something more, but he just said in a skeptical tone, “Wellllll…okay…I guess we’ll just teach him how to use it…?”

Teddy thought this gift was a really bad idea, mostly because he didn’t understand what it really was.

2: One of my happiest memories is a warm Fall day in October a few years ago. We loaded up our family in the van and drove out to the geode beds near Dugway. It’s a long drive over bumpy dirt roads, but it is beautiful. I love the wild desert scenery, the sagebrush was covered with yellow flowers, and we saw herds of wild horses. When we got to the geode beds there were crystal fragments all over the ground, and those were fun to find, but after we had been out for an hour or two, Sam and the boys were digging with big shovels, and they started to hit a layer of geodes underground. They were calling out every few minutes “Look at this! Come look what we found!” and pulling out round rocks one after another. All the kids were laughing and yelling and running back and forth with such excitement. There was one huge rock they found that was so big, they thought it couldn’t possibly be a geode, so they tapped it with the rock hammer to see if it would open, and it broke in half to reveal huge beautiful quartz crystals with that pointy hexagonal shape like you see in geology books. We couldn’t stop marveling at it. I was sitting with the little kids, who were so cute playing and falling down in the dirt and crawling into holes, and I hadn’t seen Sebastian and Abe smile so much for months. Our little picnic we’d brought tasted so good, and I looked around at my family and I just felt completely happy.

I’ve thought about that day lots of times because it felt like such a gift from God. But I was also thinking about what would happen if I could wrap up that day exactly as it was, and plop it down on the lap of myself at age twenty. I might say, “I have the most wonderful gift for you. You get to drive in your huge 12-passenger van for three hours on a dirt road with eight kids age sixteen and under, and they’ll be loud, and they’ll fight with each other about who gets to use the markers. And later you’ll see that they’ve drawn all over the seats with the markers. You’ll be seven months pregnant with your ninth baby, so you’ll feel every bump and jolt of the road. And every ten minutes your older kids will be yelling at the younger ones to be quiet so they can sleep. You’ll have made a picnic out of hard-boiled eggs and crackers and cheese and water, which is pretty much the best picnic food you can afford. You’ll have a little training toilet sitting in the car, full, because your two-year-old can’t be trusted to go more than an hour without using it. When you arrive, instead of looking for geodes, you’ll sit in the dirt watching everyone else dig for them, because someone has to keep the little kids from wandering off and falling in a pit. And congratulations, this is going to be one of the happiest days of your life.”

I think if I someone had given me that gift at age twenty, I might have run away screaming in terror. I definitely would not have felt pure gratitude for it. And yet years later, with my eyes opened by my experiences up to that point, this day legitimately felt like and still feels one of Heavenly Father’s most precious gifts to me. I would love to live that day again.

In Doctrine and Covenants 88:33, the Lord asks, “For what doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him, and he receive not the gift? Behold, he rejoices not in that which is given unto him, neither rejoices in him who is the giver of the gift.”

What does it mean to receive—or receive not—a gift?

The Savior told a parable about an unreceived gift. We all know it: a certain man had two sons. The younger son rejected his father and wasted his inheritance on riotous living. After he came to himself, he went home in shame, but to his surprise his Father was waiting and ran to meet him. The father killed the fatted calf and celebrated his younger son coming home, while the older son waited resentfully outside, refusing to join in the celebration. The father spoke to him and explained that he loved both sons, and invited the older son to join them in the house. That’s where the parable ends.

But what if it didn’t end there? In a talk given at BYU, a professor named Earl Stice imagines what happens next. He says,

This is a “happily ever after” conclusion if I have ever heard one—the prodigal is back, the elder brother has been gently shown the error of his ways, and the father has his two sons. But let’s continue with the scene. That night, after the fatted-calf leftovers have been put away in the refrigerator, everyone falls into a peaceful sleep. They arise the next morning. Is there anything left to be done? …The prodigal himself has made great strides by humbling himself and returning to the house of his father, but a huge amount of follow-through remains to be done. The prodigal has to settle down, show some responsibility, and work long and hard in those fields by the side of his elder brother. The elder brother has been taught an important lesson by his father, but resentment doesn’t disappear overnight. Forever after, when there isn’t sufficient money to hire enough laborers or to buy new tools, he must stop his mind from thinking back on the family savings bundled up, hauled off, and wasted by his younger brother. As he makes himself serve his younger brother, day by day he will see toleration of his brother grow into appreciation into friendship into love… 

The return of the prodigal son is just the beginning, not the end.

As I think about the next steps for this family, I can’t help thinking about the father’s words to his older son: “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” The gift both sons have been given is almost incomprehensible: to live and work and remain with the father, and to have what the father has. But which son really understands what it means to live in his father’s house? At this point, neither of them. The younger boy is repentant. But his habits are bad, his instincts are bad, his track record is bad. He literally doesn’t know what is good for him. I’m sure he appreciated the feast, but does he appreciate the other things the father has—diligence, patience, steadiness? He has a lot of changing to do before he can receive his father’s gifts. And the older brother, faithful and steady as he’s been, doesn’t really get it either. He’s lived all this time in the father’s house without even comprehending the gift it is just to be in his father’s presence, and without absorbing any of the other gifts his father longs to give him— compassion. Fulness. Peace. Contentment. He still thinks that life is a competition and that more gifts for one child means fewer gifts for the others. 

Both sons have been surrounded by abundance while still seeing only scarcity. They have looked at the gifts the Father has for them and felt like questioning those gifts, or even like running away screaming, instead of falling down in gratitude. 

As I’ve been thinking about this parable, I’ve been seeing it play out over and over in real life. One story goes like this:

A certain woman had two daughters. The daughters were not hers by birth. They had been born to parents who wasted their substance with riotous living. When the woman and her husband saw these daughters living in abuse and neglect, they had compassion on them, and took them into their own home. They put clothes on them, and shoes on their feet, and they said “let us eat and be merry, for we had no daughters, and they had no family, but now we have each other and can live in happiness together.”

So the daughters grew and were loved and cherished in their mother’s house. Because they had grown up in unhappiness, they were angry and sad and defiant sometimes. But they had warm beds and good food to eat, and the woman loved her children.

On the night before the older daughter’s 18th birthday, the woman baked a cheesecake, her daughter’s favorite. She wrapped birthday presents and put up balloons. But in the morning, she found her daughter’s bed empty, and a note in her room. It said, “I don’t want to be your daughter anymore. I don’t want to live in your house anymore. I want to live my own life, alone.”

The mother was devastated. She went to her own father’s house and cried to Him, “Father, I gave everything to my daughter. I gave her a home and love and a family. I tried to give her the kind of love I always felt from you. Now everything I did is for nothing. How can I continue to give gifts to my younger daughter, knowing it might happen again?”

My friend lived this story. And that’s a sad ending for a story that hopefully isn’t really over yet. But it brings up the same question: what does it mean to live in our Father’s house, and how we can receive that gift?

In my friend’s story, which daughter is lost? I can find four: the birth mother who originally lost her way. The older daughter who was saved but couldn’t recognize the gifts she’d been given. The younger daughter who was hurt by her sister leaving. And the adoptive mother who felt that her gifts might have all been given in vain. I know the Father loves all these daughters. He wants all of them to come home. He wants all of them to dwell in his house.

So again: What is the gift? What does it mean to live in our Father’s house?

I think it means learning to see our lives as the places of goodness and grace they are—even when we don’t have everything we want right now. It means being patient when things feel scarce, trusting in the abundance the father promises. It means staying on in our Father’s house when it might seem easier to leave.

To receive the gift of our Father’s house means to learn to care about our brothers and sisters as our Father cares about them. I think it means being willing to suffer when they leave his house, to feel the heavy sorrow of their absence. This is a chosen sorrow, not the involuntary sorrow of sin but the voluntary sorrow of loving others and feeling what they feel. It means accepting that the prodigal is not just “thy son” but “my brother.”

My friend, the adoptive mother, is learning what it means to live in the Father’s house. She is learning how to be like the Father—to give good gifts, and then watch her daughter reject those gifts and still not give up hope.

Living in our Father’s house means opening our eyes and learning to see where we really are. It means willingly living through the years of experience that will allow us to see a perfect day when it comes, and know that it is one. Living in our Father’s house means learning to trust that even the ugly, misshapen rock he sets down in front of us will, if we are willing to crack it open, turn out to be a beautiful geode full of sparkling crystals.

To live in our Father’s house means to accept the sorrow that comes from other people’s bad choices, in exchange for the joy of watching them come to themselves. It means learning to value both agency and obedience as much as the Father does.

Living in our Father’s house means being willing to keep laboring in the fields, keep watching and waiting at the window, for as long as it takes. It means waking up the morning after the feast and every morning after that, working to transform ourselves into people who love what the Father loves.

The ultimate example of what it would truly mean to live in our father’s house might be something like this:

A certain man had two sons. When the younger went and wasted his substance in riotous living, the elder stayed in his father’s house. He worked for his father. He did everything the father asked. He did his share of the work and his brother’s too, and he saw every day how much his father missed his younger brother.

One day the Father got word that his younger son was near death in a far country. He wept. His older son, sitting at the kitchen table with his father, said, “Father, I will go find my brother.” He went into the far country, asking everywhere for news of the boy. He walked through the inns and the gutters. He found all the places where his brother had left debts, and he paid the creditors with his own money. Finally, he found the pigsty where his brother had worked, and he saw him lying there in the mud, sick and wounded and hungry. The younger brother looked up and couldn’t believe his eyes. He said, “I wanted to go back to Father, but I didn’t have the strength, and I didn’t think anyone would want me.” The older brother said, “We want you.” He picked up his brother in his arms. He wrapped him in a blanket. And he carried him home to his father’s house. When they were yet a long way off, the father came running out to meet them. “Father, my brother is cold and hungry. Bring my own robe for him,” said the older boy. “Yes, and we will kill the fatted calf,” said the father. “Put my ring on his finger, and my shoes on his feet,” said the brother, “And let us eat and be merry,” said the father. And the older brother, rejoicing, carried his younger brother into his father’s house.

In fact, this is what our older brother did for all of us. Jesus Christ left the comfort of his father’s house, not because he didn’t recognize the gift it was to be there, but because he wanted to bring the rest of us back home to receive the gift too.

Whether we have just returned or we have been there a long time, living with gratitude in the father’s house takes effort. It involves sorrow. But ultimately, it is the greatest and most incomprehensible gift the Father could give us—it is the very meaning of eternal life: to know God and help our loved ones do the same. And as we work at that, side by side with our brother Jesus Christ, our Heavenly Father and Mother’s house will become our own eternal home. I bear my testimony that this gift is worth any cost, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.