Life on the Covenant Path

Good morning, brothers and sisters.I am very grateful to be here and thank President Kusch for his invitation. And I’m happy to add my testimony to those that have already been born by Easton, Danny, and Jihon.My ties to Ensign College go back over a hundred years to the spring of 1920, when a young woman named Emily (spoiler alert: it is not just a coincidence that we have the same name) returned to Salt Lake City after a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she and her sister had lived with an aunt, taking classes at Radcliffe College.Her journal records her appreciation for the educational and cultural opportunities of that year in Cambridge, but her almost daily entries also make it clear that those opportunities did nothing to answer her deep desire to marry and become a mother.Back in Salt Lake, she had no immediate marriage prospects, so she parlayed her rather remarkable math skills into a teaching position at what was then LDS University, now Ensign College.Here the plot thickens.Berenice, another young woman, had come to Salt Lake from Mt. Pleasant, Utah to get the further education she needed to be a stenographer and financial secretary.She enrolled at LDS University and her math teacher was Emily.What neither Emily nor Berenice could have anticipated was that decades later, when the longings of both their hearts had been answered with husbands and children, they would become grandmothers to the same grandchildren, starting with me.My grandmother Emily died from complications of childbirth long before I was born and I was always grateful when my grandmother, Berenice, would tell me stories of having her as a math teacher. I think they may be smiling in heaven today because I am here.

I have to add that the name change to Ensign College—an explicit reference to Ensign Peak—makes another family connection.My parents both grew up in Salt Lake and on their first date, Dad picked Mom up and drove directly to a quiet place near Ensign Peak, which made my mother very wary.As it turned out, my father’s intentions were entirely honorable.He dearly loved the view from that side of the valley.He went there often and knew it would be a beautiful place to talk and get acquainted.What he didn’t know until much later is that, as they stood looking out over the city and talking, my mother had a very clear impression, when she told this story she often said she heard a voice: “This is the man you are going to marry.”It took some time—years, actually—to get from there to the sealing room in the Salt Lake Temple where they were married, and I have sometimes wondered whether that whispering of the Spirit came at the very beginning so she would stay the course when their courtship got longer and longer.

In any case, for me, Ensign College has connections to family and to faith and that seems fitting because both of those things will figure largely in what I say today as we take a look together at life along the covenant path.

I think you will all recognize these words:

We, The First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of his children.

Perhaps you have had reason to memorize them—and the rest of the Proclamation of which they are a part.If not, you might try it.I can testify that it is a blessing to have that document stored up in your mind.

I was in the tabernacle on Temple Square when President Gordon B Hinckley first read the Proclamation to the General Women’s Meeting in 1995.I think few, if any, of you had been born yet and, the world has changed so much since then, you might have a hard time imagining how I felt sitting there, listening to the Proclamation for the first time, feeling the unmistakable witness of the Spirit that it was true, but also a little puzzled because it all felt so obvious.It was a proclamation, but there wasn’t anything new or surprising.

Sitting in the tabernacle that night, I could not have even begun to imagine the world in which you are moving into adulthood.

Unlike my faithful grandmothers, many young people in your generation seem to have no desire for marriage or children or the kind of family life that most of my generation took for granted.I use the word “seem” deliberately because there is a lot of data to indicate that a majority of young people still do want to marry and do want to have children—and I suspect most of you are among that number—and some of you have the wedding rings—and maybe even the cribs and car seats--to prove it.Good for you!It just tends to be the ones who aren’t marrying and the ones who are choosing what has been called “the childless life” who make the headlines.

It does seem important to acknowledge that even young people who want to marry and have children sometimes don’t move forward with their opportunities to make their desires reality.If you listen to our current cultural conversation, marriage and childbearing look hard, and in a world where divorce is common and there are many concerns about the state of our planet, marriage and childbearing may seem risky, even scary.It is easy to start inventing a list of prerequisites to make the whole thing look safer.Maybe marriage and children will feel more doable if you first do things like finishing college degrees or even graduate degrees, buying a home, or getting a job promotion and the accompanying salary increase.The list might even include things like seeing the places in the world that are on your bucket list because once you have children, you may not have the chance.None of these are bad things, but the security and comfort they seem to offer can obscure the fact that none of them are essential to successful marriage and family formation.

I want to be clear that higher education is good and often increases not only earning capacity, but also how well one is equipped to make a meaningful contribution to both the world and the kingdom—and that matters. It is good stewardship to prepare to be a contributor.In restoration scripture, there is a close link between intelligence and godliness.You are to be commended for being here, engaged in higher education.

It is also the case that there is research to show that the chances of ever experiencing poverty can be dramatically reduced by following what is often referred to as the success sequence, which begins with a certain level of education:

• Finish high school
• Get a full-time job
• Get married before you have children

The point of the success sequence is that one’s financial situation will be better if some things are prerequisite to other things.It’s pretty obvious that it makes a positive financial difference to have enough education to get a job that will provide a reasonable level of support BEFORE getting married.And it makes an even bigger difference—financial and otherwise--to be established in a committed marriage relationship, hopefully a covenantal relationship, BEFORE engaging in a sexual relationship and opening the possibility of having children. These are good ways of understanding temporal success and how to achieve it.But are other things we might have put on the list truly prerequisite to marriage or having children?

To help answer that question, I’d like to pose another one:What happens if we “think Celestial” about the success sequence?What does a success sequence look like if you’re on the covenant path, letting God prevail in your life—and if “success” means eternal life in the kingdom of God?

Here are some more words from the Family Proclamation—I’m not going to read them all but I am going to focus on the first one.

“Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.“

All of the things listed are important to successful marriages, but I am going to focus here on faith, the one that undergirds and overarches all the rest.This description of success isn’t based on a sequence, but rather on actions that we repeat over and over on the covenant path.

Successful marriages and families are established and maintained through faith in Jesus Christ.That faith leads us to find a dear friend and partner who is willing to join us in a Christ-centered life, making temple covenants.That same faith keeps us together on the covenant path, praying and repenting and forgiving, treating each other with respect and love and compassion, working hard, and sometimes finding time for wholesome recreational activities.Finding such a companion and living such a life usually happens during earth life, but if not it will happen in the next for all who are faithful.

Elder Gregorio Casillas taught us in last October’s general conference, “While it’s certainly important to prepare yourself to succeed in this very competitive world, one of your crucial missions throughout your life is to become a disciple of Jesus Christ and to follow the impressions of the Spirit. As you do this, God will bless your life; He will bless your current or future family; and He will bless the lives of His children who you encounter.”

So if you think celestial, becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ and following the impressions of the Spirit, it could look more like this:

• Finish high school
• Get a reasonable job
• Start into a college degree
• Get married in the temple
• Husband follows prompting to give up joining family farm and go to law school
• Wife continues college part-time
• They have a baby
• Together they follow prompting to leave law school and help with family farm
• They have another baby
• Both return to school and they have another baby
• Husband graduates and gets a better job
• They have four more children
• Inspired events send wife back to school fulltime
• Following graduation, wife attends graduate school part-time, gets graduate degree
• Wife gets part-time job
• Wife quits job while husband serves as bishop and children serve missions
• Children marry or begin college, wife resumes part-time work
• Unexpected door opens and wife gets fulltime job, at the Wheatley Institute

I know this sequence works because, as you might have suspected, it is the one I’ve lived through, greatly simplified to fit (just barely) on a PowerPoint slide. We haven’t done things perfectly, but we are doing our best to be on the covenant path, so our sequence is an example of two really important things.The first is that there are many possible variations that might be in your success sequence if you are trying to think celestial.The guidance of the Spirit will direct you in ways tailored exactly to your life, your needs, and your possibilities for blessing the lives of His other children.Your own plans may make God chuckle sometimes, but he loves you and will lead you aright if you let Him.The second point is that thinking celestial entails remembering that, as President Nelson has taught us, exaltation is a family matter.In practice that means that the eternally significant things, the eternal family things, must be woven in among the things that offer temporal security and success.They aren’t prerequisite to the things that come after them in the way we were talking about earlier.Instead they are just plain requisite, required for eternal success—wherever they come in the sequence—because God has asked us to do them, whether by general commandment or by personal revelation.

At this point I want to say a little more about temporal security and success.Although God sometimes showers us with wonderful temporal blessings, uninterrupted temporal security and success aren’t always part of the picture on the covenant path.It turns out that, in the eternal scheme of things, there are sometimes more important things than avoiding financial uncertainty.

Like successful marriage, flourishing in uncertainty is the fruit of faith, not faith in particular outcomes—and not faith in having a particular income--but faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His plan.And that faith leads fairly often to sacrifice, which is not just giving up desirable things, but making the giving up sacred by giving up what doesn’t matter eternally in favor of what does.

Elder Anthony Perkins spoke at the BYU devotional a couple of months ago and reminisced about being newly married and in school at BYU, subsisting mostly on a lot of macaroni and tomato juice.That brought back many memories because my husband’s first year of law school was a lot like that.We had some dear friends who were also in the first year of law school, Rick and Shelley Wilson.Many days, especially toward the end of the month, Shelley would call me or I would call her and our conversations would go something like this: “Well, we have one can of tuna left and about half a package of frozen peas.”She might answer, “We still have a little milk.We could make white sauce for the tuna and peas.”And maybe one of us had a few slices of bread left so we could put the sauce on toast.Things got so bad at one point that we even considered moving into the same apartment, but we both managed to scrape together the rent until the school year was over and we went off to summer jobs.

That couple has remained among our closest and most treasured friends. And, I wouldn’t be crying, but they are sitting right here and I didn’t know they were going to come until this morning. Fifty years after that first grueling year of law school, we are both back in Utah Valley and we plan dinner together every few weeks.Not long ago, Shelley started the conversation by saying, “Well, I have some leftover beef bourguignon that I made yesterday.”We both burst out laughing.We are a long way from splitting a can of tuna between four people.We feel very blessed—and much more grateful than we would ever know how to feel if we had never shared those difficult and sanctifying days when we were giving all we had and doing without many comforts to be on the covenant path, obedient to the Lord’s promptings about where we needed to be and what we needed to be doing, even when we couldn’t see how we were going to make it to the end of the month.God was with us and our sacrifices were answered with blessings, not always right away, but the blessings came and continue to come.

Financial uncertainty is only one of a number of things that can strain--and strengthen--a marriage, things that require faith to endure and flourish.Another thing in that category is having children.At least when you marry, your future spouse is something of a known quantity—not usually as well-known as you think, but enough to go on with.With children you may have almost no knowledge of who those children will be, almost no idea of what you’re getting into.

And yet, "God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force” and the God who gave that commandment knows and loves His children deeply and when He sends a child into a family he never makes a mistake.

It’s important to note here that, although you may not have children in mortality, there is nothing to prevent you from supporting couples who do and learning to do what they do, prioritizing children in the way you think about your life and in the relationships you choose to cultivate.

I would suggest that even people who aren’t married yet can practice this.We have a daughter who didn’t marry until she was 42 years old.Our 36 grandchildren will testify that she is the best aunt on the planet, because--especially during those years before she married--she was the one who always remembered their birthdays, spent countless hours doing things that were meaningful to them, knew them, loved them, truly saw them.She also earned the endless gratitude of the harried bishop’s wife with several young children in one of the wards she lived in because she made a habit of sitting with them in church.In another ward it was a couple with a special needs child.Our daughter is a gifted special educator and was drawn to this little guy who needed lots of extra attention to learn how to engage at church.I could go on, but I think you see the pattern.I might note, too, that even when marriage came for our daughter, children did not.After repeated miscarriages, she and her husband finally gave up their hopes of having children in this life—“We’re just not having children now,” she says to me--and they continue faithfully serving the families and children around them.

When children do come, life becomes high adventure, even if you rarely leave home.As a mother or a father you get stretched—and then stretched some more—and you grow and find surprising gifts in yourself.You also find weaknesses and faults in yourself that you didn’t realize you had. You suddenly have new understanding of your own parents and may feel more forgiving of the ways their mistakes unfold in your life.Your faith in the atonement of Jesus Christ takes on whole new dimensions as you repent and forgive in that intimate family setting.

Our wise and philosophically inclined youngest son, sometime around when he served a mission, got in the habit of responding to family and friends who were struggling with hard things by saying, gently, but with real intent, “How did you think you were going to get a broken heart?”

It’s a really great question because each of us needs a broken heart--and a contrite spirit.Ultimately, THAT is the sacrifice the Lord asks of us.Life with other people—and especially with children—is carefully designed to enable and encourage us to make that sacrifice, sometimes because those we love are experiencing painful things or making choices that break our hearts.And then sometimes we realize that we have hurt and burdened others because we aren’t perfect either and that leads us to a contrite spirit.Our broken hearts and contrite spirits take us to Christ and when we lay our sacrifice on the altar with faith in His atonement, he answers with blessings, not always right away, but the blessings come and continue to come, blessings that heal us, heal those we love, deepen our faith, draw us closer to God, and fill us with joy.

I was involved recently in a study in which we interviewed 55 women with at least a bachelor’s degree and at least five children.Only about 5% of women in the US still have that many children and even fewer also have a college or graduate degree.These are, therefore, remarkable women—and they are all women of faith, representing about a dozen faith traditions.One of the most striking things in the study was that nearly every woman spontaneously used the word joy somewhere in the interview.That is meaningful because each of these women also attested to sacrifice and sometimes sorrow in being parents. There must needs be opposition in all things.

We had 1200 pages of transcripts from the interviews, but I can give you a glimpse of the whole 1200 pages—and my own experience as a mother--in one quote from a mother of seven children: “Motherhood is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but the most rewarding thing I can imagine doing.”

The English poet William Blake described it this way:
Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine, Under every grief and pine, Runs a joy with silken twine. It is right it should be so, We were made for joy and woe, And when this we rightly know, Through the world we safely go.By William Blake

To rightly know this, to go safely through this world, is to have faith in Jesus Christ and the plan of happiness that He makes possible.As one who didn’t always rightly know this, it took me a long time till I figured it out, I stand as a witness that knowing it—and embracing it—is, in fact, safer--and happier and just better in very way.It keeps us on the covenant path.

One of my steps along the way to rightly knowing came during a period of extended financial difficulty.My profoundly faithful father said to me one day, “How do you do it?How do you live constantly dangling over the abyss?” And I heard myself say, “I have learned that there is no abyss.” I don’t think I actually had learned it until that moment when my father asked the question—and perhaps my father hadn’t either, but he agreed with me immediately because it was true.He had seen how hard things were for us, but he also saw the ways in which we were sustained by many tender mercies.

This is the most important thing I am going to say about life on the covenant path and I hope you will remember it, whatever your future holds: Along the covenant path, there is no abyss.

There are really truly hard things, and that’s an important part of Heavenly Father’s plan for us.But there is no abyss.An abyss is bottomless, dark and unfathomable.I offer my witness, along with many others, that there is no place we can go that our Savior cannot fathom and no darkness so deep that He cannot reach us.I have had the experience of going not at all meekly to the gates of heaven, exhausted and angry and wishing I’d given up yesterday and I was met with love and embrace and possibility.Wherever we are-- on the covenant path or off—our Father can always see a way for us to get home to Him if we will act in faith.

So, you can, and I hope you will, go with faith toward marriage, parenthood, and all the rigors of family life, whether they come now or later or on the other side of the veil.You can use your gifts to bless the lives of those around you.You can listen to the whisperings of the Spirit and stay the course, trusting that God will sustain you when there are hard parts.You can plan for there to be hard parts and try to welcome the opportunity to draw nearer to Him and be transformed.You can trust that the Atonement of Jesus Christ will hold open every eternal possibility.God has a plan and His Son, our Savior, is who He says He is and did what He says He did, so there is no abyss.

This is a thing I have learned by experience and also know by the witness of the Spirit, so I think I rightly know it, and yet sometimes, especially as the world around us shifts in unhappy ways, I need to be reminded.I will finish with a favorite passage from the Book of Jude that I turn to at those times.

17. But, beloved (and you are so beloved), remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ;
¹⁸ How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts.
¹⁹ These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit.
²⁰ But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost,
²¹ Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.
²⁴ Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,
²⁵ To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. 

I witness that that is true.God is real and He loves you.In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.