We take pause and contemplate without clear resolution why some of us experience a multitude of physical and emotional trials. Some of us bring our trials upon ourselves through poor judgment, ignorant choices, or careless lack of attention. But the human condition for a fallen people is filled with the vicissitudes of adversity, even for the innocent. Amidst this difficult audition of mortality we feel to echo Job, “… man is born unto trouble...” (Job 5:7). Even the pure in heart are not exempt from disappointment, pain, or sorrow.
When my sister was nearly 22 years old she was pregnant with her second child. During late stages of the third trimester she sank into a diabetic coma. This was the first indication that she had this disease. Her life was saved, but she lost the child just two weeks before its due date. When she came out of the coma, to avoid a too hasty surgery to her vulnerable body, she lay days recovering with the lifeless child in her womb. Her sorrows were deep and almost too much to bear. She mourned for her son that she would never hold in her arms, never experience the joy of his breath, his voice, his appearance. She sifted through the shock and making sense of God’s will. The doctrines of the resurrection distilled upon her soul in new ways. And she began to hope.
Now my sister’s greatness does not lie in her enduring this one palpable moment of disappointment. She is great because she, through a lifetime, cultivated the capacity to accept, reach out, and become a balm to the wounded and the weary. She was a gentle calming force to her family, to friends, to strangers. Her ability to notice, accept, and love others made her great. Her dear husband has a way of drawing attention to himself, not just because he truly is a most clever man, but because he is a dwarf. Together, my sister and he had four children, two are dwarfs and two are not. To know this family and my sister is to witness how “… God [truly] is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34). I always found an acceptance and geniality from my sister’s family unmatched by others. And it was just not me; a concourse of struggling individuals passed through their humble and simple home -- the lonely, the forsaken, the despondent and the troubled. On my many visits to their home I hardly ever had their full attention due the additional guests they had taken in. Their doors were open for a meal, a friendly conversation, or a place to retreat until one was able to meet the disappointments that lay outside. They fostered many children, and welcomed wayward teens and forlorn adults as well. One child they took in was a severely abused six year old boy. After months of care, and waiting for the state to locate him a permanent home, my sister could not let him go, so they officially adopted him, and helped carry the burdens of his trauma, loving him as their own, offering him the only stability he would ever know, until, his mental ghosts could not be appeased, and he took his own life in his twenties.
Through all these years of suffering long with others, showing gentleness, meekness, and love unfeigned, my sister’s health continued to deteriorate. Her diabetes was severe and she carried an insulin pump attached to her hip. Her eye sight declined appreciably and required laser surgery. Determined to bring other lives into this world she gave birth to two more children after losing her second. Literally on the edge of death each time, she carried on with these little ones and rejoiced with their cries for breath. She raised them with increasing discomfort and a failing kidney. The twice weekly complete blood dialysis grew wearisome. Her living body seemed to decay before us, instead of the spritely, happy and vibrant girl we knew, the lines of deep pain carved out in her face, and even lying down was not a respite from discomfort. The opportunity for a kidney transplant became evermore dim due to her rare blood type. Not even her four brothers, who loved and idealized her deeply, could provide a match. These four over-achieving brothers knew that the true greatness belonged to our sister. She was the pure one, sanctified by her suffering and sacrifice. We all learned something about the potency of family, how we are called upon to persevere and endure with each other. It is my sister, more than any other that has led to my own personal reflection on the meaning, the depth, and the significance of family, even when things go wrong.
Each of you here today belongs to a range of families from the most small scale, immediate family of parents and siblings, to ever larger circles that include extended family, communities of interconnected kin, the brothers and sisters of the Church, and even the human family as a whole. Some of you come with tender feelings of affection for your families, lives of tranquility and joy that elicit your deepest care and secure your identity. No doubt your families have passed through trials and challenges, but you hold on with faith and purpose. For others, the thought of family may engender feelings of disappointment, strain, and even trauma. Nothing can hurt more than the sorrows precipitated by misfortunes of abandonment, neglect, or abuse. Sometimes the grief of family ties carry on for years, a lifetime, and even generations. It is in the family that we will experience our greatest joys and most profound sorrows. It should come as no surprise to us that this unit we call family, with its complete range for the good and the bad, should be at the core of the doctrines of the Church. Some would wish to dismiss the family as inconsequential and even detrimental to personal and social well being, either because the ideal of the family creates an unattainable longing that can only result in disappointment and prolonged suffering, or because it is an idealized fiction so far removed from the reality of our earthly family that we are left with frustration and alienation. And yet this is what we have, we have families; they are both biologically derived and socially maintained in a breathtaking range of culturally diverse configurations. And also, we have a God who keeps speaking of families as the center of our personal journey to perfection. He keeps reminding us that families are to be pursued with purposeful commitment, that we are to place them at the center of our applications of the doctrines of Christ, to make them our priority despite the realization of potential problems. His work, at its very core, is the restoration of family, and by keeping family life in perspective with God’s purposes and ways, I think we can summon the courage to not only endure, but to endure well.
Our Father in Heaven knows profoundly how the family is riddled with the greatest challenges and tensions. Since the very beginning, at least the beginning of the narrative we have about the beginning, He has been working to overcome the schism in His own family. The call down the primordial corridors, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning,” echoes all these dispensations later (Isaiah 14:12). Our Father knows something about rebellion. Lucifer is our brother--yes, I’m sorry Christian world that thinks us absurd to consider him a sibling to us and Christ, but it is true, he is our mutinous brother, and it is out of this rift in the family that Christ’s great atoning work will come into focus with purpose and integrity. Our pre-existent family was torn between two of our brothers, and we were persuaded in fractions--of a third and two thirds. One of these brothers has been working to get us all back together, and the other, to keep us apart. So our primordial family was contentious. But to deny this family at war, to make it all a utopian state of undifferentiated tranquil intelligences, would undermine a plan of salvation and leave us a blank mass, “compounded into one...” with “neither sense nor insensibility,” unable to act but only to be acted upon (2 Nephi 2:11). To make things work our Father had to let some go, and I can’t help but believe that the Son of the Morning designates not only the beginning of time, but the son for whom he mourns.
Since then all the realities of our lives have emerged through family dysfunction. Let us recall the family of our first parents after they entered the lone and dreary world. Their offspring had a few rifts too. This first earthly family had challenges that tore them apart. Guilt, frustration, and jealousy led to fratricide and that lame deflection of culpability, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” --distancing himself from responsibility and a naïve assumption that he could deceive the Lord (Genesis 4:9). Yes, Cain, you are your brother’s keeper. This early case of intra-family violence initiates an awful legacy of human conflict. Wayward children are the experience of many parents and do not reflect on their rectitude. Certainly Adam and Eve were heartbroken by this unfortunate event; they are not less because of a rebellious son. We remember our first parents with deepest reverence.
There have been other significant family disruptions that set the course for the world today. The intrigues between Isaac and Ishmael chartered a divergent course between two different resulting civilizations. What we see today in the Middle East is really just a very old family feud, the posterity of a prophet. The next generations didn’t fare much better; with Jacob and Esau we witness parents taking sides and a blessing shifted to a non-traditional line. The strong feelings linger through their posterity--“And Esau hated Jacob” (Genesis 27:41). And then Jacob’s own sons continued the tradition of jealousy that can lead to fraternal elimination. But the story of Joseph gives us hope, that although his brothers sought his demise (some by death, some by exile as a slave); there can ultimately be family redemption and reconciliation through forgiveness. The house of Israel, despite its unending fractures, has been, and will be, a story of restoration. But oh how their journey has been split through intra-family rebellion. In the Americas, Lehi’s sons again struggled over authority, and the righteous one, Nephi, would usurp traditions of seniority. This was too much for the older brothers Laman and Lemuel, “Our younger brother thinks to rule over us...now let us slay him...” (2 Nephi 5:3). Such family ruptures are not just the routine of the ancients, but the families of latter-day prophets have also experienced division; after the deaths of the Prophet Joseph and his brother Hyrum their respective families and posterity charted very different courses. From all this upending of family it becomes clear that if the Adversary wishes to not only affect an immediate family but whole generations and even civilizations, he targets the family.
The far reaching implications of familial conflict are unambiguous to modern prophets. No wonder they warn that, “...the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets” ( The Family: A Proclamation to the World). These prophets’ ability to see things clearly through both a micro and macro focus provides resolution. They see the small and large scale implications of family disrupture, the most local and personal with the ever increasing social ramifications at a global scale. Clearly they are prophets, seers, and revelators. The family is such a precarious institution and yet so essential to righteousness sake. How can family in some instances be so supportive and even defend each other with their lives, and in other cases, as the Savior even articulated, “brother shall deliver up brother to death, and the father the child; and the children shall rise up against their parents.”
In contrast to that which divides families and creates enmity between its members, prophets and apostles proclaim that, “Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities” ( The Family: A Proclamation to the World). None of these conditions are arbitrary, but each carefully selected and placed in this list as critical components to family coherence. To fix and secure the family has such far-reaching implications on the social fabric of our lives. The solutions to dysfunction in the family are found in the gospel. May I suggest that Joseph Smith’s prayer and prophecies while incarcerated in Liberty jail provide us a most salient solution for family function. His admonition to priesthood holders applies to us all: that “No power or influence can or ought to be maintained... only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and love unfeigned; By kindness, and pure knowledge... Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase in love...” (D&C 121:41-43). I stand before you this day because of goodly parents who exercised copious amounts of long-suffering and love unfeigned.
Now if our families offer the foundational location of our earthly tutorial, I wish to also use them as the point of departure to address ever larger familial bodies that matter to us. For instance, we often speak of our ward families, and it seems God has instituted the ward to expand our sense of kinship with all its attendant responsibilities, love and service. I deeply appreciate the use of kinship terms in the Church--Brother and Sister. These terms suggest a leveling, equality, a mutual responsibility – they connote that we are of the same generation, accountable to each other as siblings. I note the Savior’s twice repeated commandment, “And let every man esteem his brother as himself, and practise virtue and holiness before me. And again I say unto you, let every man esteem his brother as himself” (D&C 38:24). Duplication often indicates significance. I like the emphasis. It is in wards, President Packer suggested, that the gospel is actually practiced.
The brotherhood and sisterhood of a ward is found in our “…willing[ness] to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times...” (Mosiah 18:9). This act of familial service gains great substance through our baptism and confirmation -- this gateway into a family of diverse individuals who we learn to love despite our sometimes challenging variety. We develop love for our own family members through endurance and service. And likewise, we sometimes must persevere with fellow ward members, in quiet covenanted service. And when we do, a deep appreciation and affection grows for each other. But we should not as saints be insular; we are even accountable to the stranger, they too are our brothers and sisters. “I was a stranger, and ye took me in” (Matthew 25:35). There really should be “...no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints...” (Ephesians 2:19).
When I was 14, I played football on my ninth grade team – yes I once played football. In those days I was very skinny, actually the lightest member of the team, but I could play wide-receiver and my size mattered less than getting open. My 119 pounds was actually under the limit to qualify for the team but they listed me on the roster 10 pounds heavier. At the beginning of the season in my nearly all white junior high school of middle class homogeneity, a boy named Perry Taufaasau enrolled and came out for the football team. The coaches were interested because one, Perry was large for our age, 6’3 and 250 pounds. His pedigree was also promising; his father was African American and a former professional boxer who had actually lasted 15 rounds with Cassias Clay, you know him as Muhammad Ali. And his mother was Samoan. At that time he lived with his older brother who had just finished an illustrious career as the nose tackle for the Boise State Broncos football team – even in those days they were a team to be reckoned with. Perry had been sent to Boise from Los Angeles, California by his mother to extricate him from gang life. His arrival at our white-bread school caused quite a stir, not only was he racially different, but he dressed and moved different, like a gangster from the hood. While I am sure he longed for camaraderie, he seemed to revel in his cool, stand-offish demeanor. He just looked mean, and knew all these timid teenagers were terrified of him. The only time he really spoke with any one was during football practice when he would taunt opposing linemen with diminutives and insults.
One day during the lunch hour he strutted into the gym where most of the students were hanging out and then sat alone looking mean (again) on one of the benches. I thought, “Enough of this;” I really felt that as a follower of Jesus I should make some kind of gesture for inclusion. So I went up and sat next to him, and said, trying to sound confident with no fear, “Hey man, what’s going on?” Not a very deep opening line, but it seemed cool at the time. I gave him the hand shake of the seventies (there have been numerous variations since) and he said, “Not much.” Wow, we are getting somewhere with this. And then we just talked. I joked with him about how he had embarrassed one of our teammates when he laid him out flat during practice. He smiled just ever so slightly. He joked with me about how skinny I was. Perhaps because I made fun of myself too, he started to smile even more. So we talked through the lunch period. It was probably nothing I really said, but that I said something, anything to him, and from then on I was his “Little Mac” (My name is McArthur). We hung out together often, and everyone came to see us as an odd couple; the dark, giant, scowling, sarcastic gangster football player with the miniature white boy almost-too-skinny-to-be-seen Mormon. One thing was for sure, through all the years he remained in school no one ever hassled me! Ultimately, after a couple years of playing football and trying to make the grade Perry was kicked off the football team for just too many fights with other teams, his teammates, and even with fans who came to heckle him. But we remained friends. As I sought ever more to honor my priesthood and keep myself in good company, he continued to spiral out of control with an indulgent, sometimes violent, and often illegal lifestyle. When he needed someone to talk to we still got together and enjoyed a laugh. I even encouraged him to come to Church with me. He didn’t. But increasingly I would only see him after trouble with the law. One morning he called me from the hospital. I rushed to see him; he was recuperating from a serious injury after he wrapped a stolen car around a tree traveling 100 miles an hour while being pursued by police officers.
We kept sporadic contact after his juvenile detention sentence, and then I went away to college. Then during my second year of college as I was preparing for a mission he called me when I had come home during the Christmas break. He told me how he had a steady job; he was working as a bouncer at a local bar. He asked if we could meet. So I invited him to attend a Young Single Adult Christmas dance (a risk yea?). He accepted. I told him how he needed to be in standards and that under no circumstances could he be inebriated. So I picked him up and we went to the dance. We had a great time. He was masterful at the robot (ever heard of that dance style?). I took him home afterward. He said he had not had such good fun in years, if ever. I invited him to the YSA New Years Eve dance for the next week. He readily accepted. The following week I returned to the house he was staying where a bunch of other big Polynesian former football players lived, none of them members. “Hey Little Mac,” they greeted me, “Perry is not here. Not sure where he went. But hey, you are the one friend we can trust that will do him good.” When I arrived they had already begun their own New Years Eve libations so I departed quickly. I headed to the dance the whole evening hoping he would make a sudden appearance. He never came.
The next day, New Years Day, I received a phone call that he was in jail for a burglary the evening before. Instead of being with me and enjoying the company of great YSA members, he had gotten drunk, and then broke into a closed restaurant with really no purpose than to use the restroom. I had to return back to school before his trial, but by the time I returned home that summer he was incarcerated at the state penitentiary to serve a 3-5 year prison term. During that summer I received my mission call to serve in the Micronesia Guam Mission and I dutifully prepared myself for this honor. Each week, I traveled to the penitentiary to visit him. I was intimidated by all the security and pat downs to enter the room for the one-hour-only visit. I was the only one who ever came to see him. We had great conversations, he told me more than I wanted to know about prison life and I told him about the gospel. I told him that despite the bad hand dealt in this life, he really did matter, and that freedom only comes through obedience to the will of the Lord. He was jealous that I was headed to the islands. All his life he wanted to reconnect to the islander roots of his mother’s family. Just a few days before I would depart for the MTC I visited him one last time. I told him I loved him and that Jesus loved him too. This giant man (he was now much bigger than in high school) gave me the same handshake we used all those years ago as boys (he couldn’t hug me, it was against the rules), and told me, “I love you man, you’re my Little Mac.” And so tearfully we parted. He called out as I left, “Give `em the gospel brother.” Yes, I was his brother, and as I left I recalled the Lord’s statement, “…I was in prison, and ye came unto me” (Matthew 25:36).
But the story does not end there. And there really is no happy ending though I am sure you are hoping for one. Into the last half of my mission I received word that he had been released from prison on parole, and then one winter day, when my mother had gone out in the garage to get in her car, she was startled to find Perry sleeping in the back seat to get out of the cold. After gathering herself she told him to come in the house to get warm and prepared him some hot food for breakfast. Then she sent him on his way. A short time later he was wandering the streets one evening in the inclement weather and called my parents in his distress. My father went to bring him home and out of the cold. They prepared him another hot meal and sat at our table. After he had eaten he suddenly, in an abrupt shift, slammed his hand down upon the table, stood up, and ordered my parents in a gruff voice to stand. They were greatly alarmed by this sudden aggressive and seemingly hostile behavior. Frightened beyond reason, they stood up. And then, this giant outlaw that even put fear into the meanest of street fighters, wrapped his arms around my parents, hugged them tightly but tenderly, and kindly told them, “You and your son are the only people who have ever been nice to me. This is family.” Relieved and also moved, my parents returned a kind word. Then my father took him and dropped him off where he wanted to go. I wish there was more to tell you. Perry exited our lives. He was eventually ordered out of the state, and should he return he would find himself back in prison for a very long time. All we heard is that he returned to California. But I can testify, that this son of God taught me more about becoming a true follower of Christ than about any other. Strangely, he also prepared me well for my mission. He served as one of my missionary prep. teachers, because you see, he was my Samoan precursor to my much loved companions Nelson Leausa, Fatu Stevenson, and Tiitii Tuiletefuga, they too much larger than me, men of great girth and stature. Because there were only four of us missionaries in the Marshall Islands I even remained with one of them for nearly a year, 24/7, opening areas to mission work and learning to serve and love each other as we served the Lord. But often, during my mission while I diligently worked with my companions, I would reflect on Perry and quietly thank God, and hope in some way he would feel this gratitude. As I taught with these noble Polynesian companions I would remember Perry’s encouraging words from prison, “Give `em the gospel brother.”
There is a significant traditional principle from the Pacific Islands that rings true; that royalty are literally the descendents of the Gods, that they have a divine genealogy. But the great truth is, such an ancestry does not just belong to those of high rank, but we all share in the divine lineage. As the Psalmist sang, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High” (Psalms 82:6). And Paul adjoins, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs...and joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:16-17). And then Abinadi’s words, “...they are the heirs of the kingdom of God” (Mosiah 15:11). We are all heirs to the throne; we are all royal, as children of God we share in the celestial parentage, we are thus brothers and sisters all, each of us who belong to the human family. In his great discourse on the Doctrine of Inclusion, Elder M. Russell Ballard declared, “There are some of our members who may fail to reach out with friendly smiles, warm handshakes, and loving service to all...The Lord expects a great deal from us... (to) practice...the principle of inclusion of others, and not exclusion because of religious, political, or cultural differences.”
While some try to keep this family, this royal lineage, divided in enmity, there is a greater force restoring this vast family – Israel is being gathered, and all belong. We can think of this gathering as a great family reunion. Of the many things the Savior taught to the peoples of America after His resurrection he emphasized boldly this great principle of the gathering of Israel. He taught clearly that restoring this family was part of a great restoration of all things. Reuniting family was part of His great purposes. And how do we assist with this grand design? The Savior explained it: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Through proclaiming the gospel of peace and doing temple services we are providing therapy to this divided family. In this way we unite the family of God and overcome what Lucifer did to our human family in his first gesture to divide us.
Look around you. Here is your family. We take our mutual kinship literally in the restored gospel. Christ’s message of inclusive kinship reaches across cultures, nations, and races. This gospel is about the large scale, about dispensations and all generations of time. Reaching out in small gestures to others is participating in the reunification of God’s family on the grandest scale of time.
My sister taught me about caring for others even in the most difficult and inconvenient circumstances. She motivated me to think globally and eternally, while serving locally and personally. Finally, after years of waiting, on one Christmas Eve she was notified that a kidney that matched with her was available. She was rushed to Salt Lake City five hours away through the night so that on Christmas morning she would receive the immediate transplant. All went well with the surgery and she began to recover. Unfortunately, she contracted a staph infection in the hospital. And while the kidney was functioning well, all the other bodily systems seem to be shutting down. She spent endless months in the hospital, only going home on rare occasions. Then her lung collapsed and part of it was removed in an emergency surgery. As she was recovering from this additional bodily trauma a hospital attendant dropped her while lifting her to a gurney. Her whole side with the wound from the lung surgery was ripped open. Her deterioration accelerated. In her suffering, as some sought retribution, she calmly uttered to me, “He didn’t mean to.” In her agony she had sympathy for the one who had injured her. “Father...they know not what they do.” The wound festered and her body continued to decline, and then, nearly four years after the transplant, just a week before Christmas, she quietly slipped through the veil and entered another glorious family reunion. If there was ever a countenance of the Savior written in a face it was in my sister. Through her I came closer to understanding the suffering of the Christ, of the dignity and love expressed through suffering, of how his sacrifice makes Him the father of our souls, and how our own suffering sanctifies and purifies us. There is ultimately healing to our bodies, our spirits, and our families. Our brother, our father, is a God of restoration. As members of families, as members of wards, as children of Israel, as the children of God, we may trust that He will restore us to a great union. It is this power of communion through family I trust and bear witness.