the Doctrine of the Family

About three weeks ago, my oldest child gave a talk in Primary. The topic was "The Family is Central to Heavenly Father's Plan." He is seven, going on eight, and he has given many talks in Primary before, so I let him do the preparing and all I did was type up what he told me. He decided to focus on the plan part of it, so he went over the Plan of Salvation, complete with a visual aid, and then talked about how the family fit into that plan. As part of the preparation, I read some of The Family: A Proclamation to the World with him and discussed a little bit of it.

Later that day, I just felt inspired to teach a Family Home Evening lesson on the Proclamation. We've had it hanging in our house since we got married, right next to the most recent picture of the family, but I don't think we've ever told our children about it. So the next night, I pulled the Proclamation off the wall and we all sat down for FHE.

We didn't go over the whole thing, just hit certain key points, like marriage being between a man and a woman and the fact that mothers and fathers have different roles. We talked about how the world, people who don't know or understand Jesus' teachings, want to change families to include other definitions of it. I'm not sure how much the kids understood, but our seven-year-old seemed to understand most of it. But I felt that it was something that was necessary to talk about, especially so our children would know what that piece of paper is that we have hanging in a prominent place in our house.

A couple days later, our March Ensign came in the mail. I opened it and skimmed through it, like I always do. One article caught my eye--Teaching the Doctrine of the Family by Julie B. Beck, general Relief Society president. The tag of the article states this, "This generation will be called upon to defend the doctrine of the family as never before. If they don’t know the doctrine, they can’t defend it." Then the whole article goes on to explain the doctrine of the family and how it relates to Heavenly Father's plan for his children and how important it is that we teach this doctrine to our children.

I really feel like I was inspired to teach that lesson for Family Home Evening, so I don't think it was a coincidence when that article came out in the March Ensign. Since then, we've had one more lesson about it where we talked about our new baby coming and how that fits into the plan and what we can all do to help this new baby be happy. I really loved the article and am glad that it came out when it did.