For the Joy of Human Love

"For the Joy of Human Love"

Elder Bruce C. Hafen

November 13, 2001

With Sister Hafen here today, I've been thinking of a moment when I was president of Ricks College and we went with the basketball team to Kansas for the national tournament. The team did very well that year. As they were playing in the semi-final game, our little group of Ricks fans were in the big arena cheering the team on. Our cheering section included a few local Church members and some local people who had just been attracted to the team during the tournament. At half-time, a woman came to talk to us. She said, "I've been watching you people cheer." She turned to Marie and said, "I have to know which one of those boys on that Ricks basketball team is yours, because I've never seen a mother cheer so hard. Which one is it? We want to cheer for him too." As Marie wondered what to tell her, I said, "They're all hers."

I'm grateful Marie is here today. She still feels like a cheerleader for all of you. Especially given what I want to talk about with you today, I'd like to ask her just to say hello to you, then I'll go ahead.

(Marie K. Hafen) It's true. I'm sorry. I still feel like you're all mine, even though this is a new generation. But seeing your shining faces makes me think of a scripture. "And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you; and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things." (D&C 88:67)

Now that doesn't mean you are going to get an A on your English test or your biology test next week, but you will be comprehending things of much more importance. And I have seen the light in your faces in the classrooms here, and in missionary zone conferences.

I have had the wonderful opportunity of teaching at both Ricks (BYU-Idaho) and BYU-Provo part-time, including a class this semester. We are writing based on the Book of Mormon as the text. I have seen the light grow in my students' eyes. I want to tell you about two students. One is a young man who wrote in one of his papers that when he was in high school he made a few mistakes. He woke up one morning with a terrific headache-and I don't have to tell you what that was from. But he said, "I asked myself, 'What you are you doing to yourself/'" Then he said, "I realized I was wrong, and I changed my life." He repented in the very positive way that repentance means to me-to change, to turn around. And I could see in his face the light that means he has felt the forgiveness that comes through the atonement of Jesus Christ.

The second student I would like to tell you about is me. I feel like I continue to be a student of the Book of Mormon, a student of how to express what it means to me to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. I want to increase that light within me so that my eye can be single to him, so that there is eventually no darkness in me.

One other verse from the Book of Mormon has come to mean more and more to me, teaching us that the light within us grows as we become more like him: "For we labor diligently to write [and to help others that we love to write], to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do." (2 Nephi 25:23)

We work to keep our eyes single to God. He helps us to increase our light to be more like him. I would say it one more time. We know that it is by grace that we are saved, as we do all we can. He is with us, I testify, every step of the way as we increase the brightness within us and strive to help others increase their brightness. I testify that he knows each one of you, that he loves each one of you, and that your families are important. Elder Hafen will be talking about families this afternoon. Without the atonement, our families could not be together forever. I testify to that in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

(Elder Hafen)

Speaking of Kansas, a young man from Kansas married a young woman from California. The wedding was in a Kansas churchhouse. As the bride and groom dashed happily out of the church, their friends waved and laughed and threw wheat over them. Ducking her head, the bride asked her new husband, "Why are they throwing wheat at us?" Said the groom, "We just got married! They're happy for us!" Still puzzled, the bride said, "You don't throw wheat at newlyweds, you're supposed to throw rice." "Honey," the groom explained, "This is Kansas--it's the wheat state!" "Well," she said, "then I'm sure glad I didn't marry somebody from Idaho."

Brothers and sisters, you wonderful souls, I want to talk with you today about fulfilling your dream of family life-your own marriage and your own family. Taking a phrase from the Thanksgiving hymn we just sang, let's talk today about "The Joy of Human Love."

Hollywood has recently found a theme the public loves-happy-ending stories about angels, and about life and love after death. Awhile back, some of my children took me to see "What Dreams May Come." In this movie, Robin Williams dies in an accident, then finds his wife and children in a very colorful "heaven"-but only after going through a very ugly "hell" to save his wife. The film's hope is that love and family life can exist beyond death. That is a message most people today want to believe is true.

Yet at the same time, ironically, many families today are dysfunctional. As President Hinckley has said, "The family is falling apart. Not only in America, but across the world."(1) One third of all babies in the U.S. are now born outside of marriage and over half of all new marriages will probably end in divorce. No wonder Hollywood is looking for happy endings.

Is eternal family joy possible, or is that just the stuff of dreamy movie plots and Church videos? Even some LDS young people these days despair of seeing their family dreams come true. One returned missionary told his stake president that he'd seen so many family disasters, he didn't dare get married unless someone could guarantee that his family would not fail.

The children's song, "Follow the Prophet," describes today's confusion: "Now we have a world where people are confused. If you don't believe it, just watch the news." And the song's answer: "Follow the Prophet-he knows the way!" The Prophet has now issued the Family Proclamation, which teaches us how our families really can live happily ever after.

The Restoration's doctrine of eternal families is a light in a very dark world-and the light is beginning to be noticed. Consider how some thoughtful people from outside the Church view the LDS family across three dimensions. With a nod to Charles Dickens, let's call this Family Future, Family Past, and Family Present.

First consider Family Future. When I was teaching law at BYU-Provo a few years ago, I received a phone call from Kenneth Woodward, the religion editor of Newsweek magazine. After he had asked some questions about family law issues, he wondered if I were a Mormon. When I said yes, he said, "I see where the Mormons got some pretty good play in the new book on heaven out of Yale."

Not knowing that Yale was all that much into books about heaven, I asked him to tell me more. He said the book, Heaven: A History, was written by two non-LDS scholars and published by Yale University Press.(2) It traces the history of beliefs about heaven in Western culture. It concludes by reporting how people, and religions, think of heaven today. The authors found that the public feels a widespread hunger for heaven - and families in heaven. The majority of Americans still believe in life after death, and in "the eternal nature of love and the hope for heavenly reunion" with their families. Yet, most Christian churches offer little response to this public yearning. Rather, today's "ideas about what happens after death are only popular sentiments and are not integrated into Protestant and Catholic theological systems."(3)

Then the authors describe one "major exception" to this religious vacuum about heaven -- "the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." They describe our teachings about temples and eternal marriage, concluding that "the understanding of life after death in the LDS church" offers the most complete concept of heaven in our day.(4) What a discovery! Most people today long for eternal families, and the Restoration fulfills that longing better than any other known set of ideas. I wish the whole world could see a video with the student body of BYU-Idaho singing the glad news: "Families can be together forever."

Sometimes I have been assigned to interview people who earlier made mistakes that led to the loss of their priesthood and temple blessings, and now they want to come back into full church fellowship and reclaim their blessings. In these very tender conversations, I often ask, "What motivated your desire to come back?" Most of the answers are variations on a central theme. That theme was illustrated by one man who had been working as a lonely sheepherder after being separated by his wrong choices from his family. He said he'd sit alone and look into his campfire each night, thinking about his wife and his children. He would say to himself, over and over, "I want to be with my family, eternally, more than I want anything else." That powerful vision of his Family Future gave him the courage and strength to repent and return.

Next consider Family Past. I was present when the Church gave a large personal family history to the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard. The PM, as the Aussies call him, was delighted to learn all about his ancestry. Then he asked, "Do I correctly understand that your Church has the largest collection of family history records in the world?" We gladly said yes.

We also told him that the Church has now made many of those records freely accessible on the Internet through FamilySearch.org. People everywhere feel a growing hunger to understand themselves better by understanding their ancestral "roots." Church members pursue these roots and records partly to know their ancestors, but also to help fulfill their dream of a forever family by building eternal bonds across the generations.

The spirit of Family Past in our doctrine also includes our appreciation for Adam and Eve, our first mortal parents. Our understanding of Family Past reaches even further back, prior to Eden, prior to the earth's creation--to our family relationship with God himself. Through the Restoration, we know that each of us lived in a pre-earth life with God, the literal father of our individual spirits. I recently met a bright and vivacious new Church member from Illinois whose discovery of the doctrine of our pre-mortal life was the turning point in her conversion. These ideas rang so true and meant so much to her that she just kept telling everybody, "We lived before! We lived before!"

This is why we pray to God as "Heavenly Father," and why we refer to one another as "brother" and "sister." Our Father gave us the opportunity of coming to earth to develop through demanding experience the personal qualities we need to live permanently with him. Then, as Sister Hafen said, the atonement of Jesus Christ makes it possible for us, if we are faithful, to live eternally "at-one" with our Heavenly Father and with our mortal families.

The most beloved of all LDS children's songs captures this idea in child-like clarity: "I am a child of God." A few years ago in Australia's Northern Territory, one of the most remote places on earth, I visited the Church's only branch where all of the members are Aboriginees. Because the branch is so isolated-500 miles from its District priesthood leaders-I wanted to know what the members there were learning about the gospel. On impulse, I asked all the children if they could sing, unrehearsed, "I Am a Child of God." I can still feel the assurance I felt then as they gathered and sang every word with earnest smiles, their faces full of light. "Teach me all that I must do, to live with Him someday." I sensed that they were on the homeward spiritual path.

As the song teaches, our earthly home is an extension in both purpose and pattern of our pre-earth home. And it prepares us for our eternal home. This "great plan of happiness" is all about marriage and life in families. As Elder Dallin H. Oaks said, "The fulness of eternal salvation is a family affair . . . The gospel plan originated in the council of an eternal family, it is implemented through our earthly families, and it has its destiny in our eternal families. The mission of our Church can be expressed in terms of the mission of the family."(5)

This understanding places the Family Present-our mortal family and our own marriages- within the eternal perspective of a Family Past and a Family Future. This context makes our understanding of our earthly families like the second act in a three act play. Act one is our pre-earth life in the family of God, act two is our current mortality, and act three is our eternally sealed families after death. Without the vision gained from acts one and three, the second act could seem either too short, too long, too hard, or too confusing. When we do know about all three acts, act two acquires an infinite significance.

I've sometimes been asked by people of other faiths, why is it that so many LDS families seem to thrive, even in this age of family decline? We clearly have our share of troubled homes. But they still ask, "How do you explain the amazing confidence in marriage and family life that I see in the Mormons I know?" A law professor from Tokyo visited the U.S. to explore his concerns about the damaging effect of American culture on Japanese family commitments. He told me that the two most corrosive forces in his culture are the immorality in American TV and movies, and the self-centeredness of American law. He said, "You beat Japan in the second world war. Do you have to inflict your movies and your laws on us too?"

Then, after he'd been on the BYU-Provo campus several days, mixing in the dorms with students, this professor said, "You must tell me about these students and their families. This campus is an island of hope in the land of the apocalypse. What is the secret behind all the shining eyes?"

Questions like these can't be fully answered in social or behavioral terms, because Act One and Act Three of a Latter-day Saint's family understanding make Act Two - Family Present -- more a matter of religion than of mere social behavior. When we consider LDS attitudes toward marriage and children, we are talking primarily about Church doctrine. To paraphrase President Boyd K. Packer, this is a case where our understanding of the doctrine will influence our behavior much more than talking only about behavior will influence our behavior.

Those who lack eternity's doctrinal perspective on time and on human relationships can too easily cave in to the pessimistic assumptions of believing that "there's no tomorrow." King MacBeth's chilling speech upon hearing of Lady MacBeth's death captures the cynical attitude that sees Act Two as the entire play: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ . . . / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death./ Out, out, brief candle./ Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,/ that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ and then is heard no more./ It is a tale told by an idiot,/ full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

When I hear that phrase in a more modern context, "there's no tomorrow," I remember a song that was popular during my high school days. I still remember the dance and the girl my memory associates with the song. I can even remember the words. "There's no tomorrow, when love is new. There's no tomorrow, for lovers true. So kiss me, and hold me tight. There's no tomorrow, there's just tonight."

But brothers and sisters, there IS tomorrow. Thank heaven, literally, there is tomorrow. And because there is tomorrow, all our yesterdays have meaning and all our dreams have hope. That is why true love is never wasted, and our sacrifices for the sake of eternal love signify everything. We do not strut and fret for but an hour on life's stage, and our candles do not go out by darkness. As the poet wrote, "Death is not an extinguishing of the light. It is a putting out the lamp because the dawn has come." As we truly yearn for Family Future and Family Past, then, everything about Family Present matters more.

I know it isn't easy to translate these principles into a tidy, daily reality, because mortal family life is by its nature a continual struggle between the ideal and the real. But if the home from which you come is anchored in the gospel, you are very fortunate, although even temple-married families (in case you haven't noticed) aren't perfect. As Mary Hales said, "If you think you've seen a perfect family, you just don't know them well enough." Still, if your home often knows the warm feelings of love and laughter, and if your family is trying-even most of the time-to have family prayer, home evening and honestly shared gospel experience, you are learning the pattern for happiness.

Many years ago when our family was young and we lived in Rexburg, our seven children were sometimes almost too "active in the Church." I would often remember the words of our bishop from a few years earlier. He would shake his head and smile at our lively little crowd trying to hold still on a Church bench and say, "the Hafen children - curtain climbers, rug rats, and house apes!" Your family might seem that way sometimes. We can't help seeing each other at our worst, and our best, in the closeness of family life. In the worst moments, we may wonder how we can keep living with each other. But in the best moments, we can't really imagine living without each other.

In the basement of our Rexburg home on the night before our oldest son, Jon, left for his mission, we pulled together "the family slide show," the best and funniest pictures of our family over twenty years. At the end of the show, we knelt in prayer together, and spontaneous tears flowed. No more curtain climbers and rug rats-just imperfect young men and women, and their imperfect parents, who felt an honest love for each other. And those feelings have kept growing, as the constant stretching from family reality toward family ideals gives each of us the desire to live worthy of belonging to each other in time and in eternity.

I realize that, for some of you, your family life is torn. In Les Miserables, Fantine sings of her childhood dream "that love would never die." Then she cries, "But the tigers come at night, and tear your [dreams] apart." I know how hard family problems can be. I have seen plenty of tigers tear at people's dreams.

I also know some valiant Church members who have absorbed the pain of their own family trauma rather than passing it on to others. They "renounce [family] war and proclaim [family] peace, and seek diligently to turn the hearts of the children to their fathers." (D&C 98:16) Many of you are such a powerful force for good in your families, that you are acting as Saviors on Mt. Zion for them by your example of love and forgiveness. Emulating Jesus, you often give sweet commitment in exchange for bitterness. How I admire you.

Whatever our circumstances, we all feel the longing to belong in eternal unity with a loving family. The power of hanging on to that feeling as a deep, personal vision is very strong. The mental image of his wife gave Viktor Frankl the strength to survive the agonies of

a Nazi concentration camp: "As we stumbled on for miles, dragging one another onward," he wrote, "my mind clung to my wife's image. [H]er look was more luminous than the sun. For the first time in my life, I grasped the greatest secret that human poetry and thought have to impart: The salvation of man is through love." Therefore, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."(6) His "why" was the vision of one day reuniting with his wife and his family. Full of such hope, he could live with the awful "how" of imprisonment.

A young friend of ours named Karl walked joyfully out of the temple after his wedding. He said he had first met Kate, his bride, when he was only 14. "That's when I first saw the vision," he told us, smiling at Kate in her white dress. "But I wasn't worthy of her, so she never knew how much I admired her. Then after years of school, seminary, and a mission, I saw her again. And this time I was ready."

Now what must you DO to make your family dreams become a reality? Someone once said that a vision without work is dreaming, and work without a vision is drudgery. But vision and work together bring joy and fulfilment. Some young Latter-day Saints may believe in the vision of a happy eternal family, but they aren't willing to do the work and pay the price to fulfill the dream. Without the heavy lifting-the work--of preparation and obedience, even a wondrous vision of a celestial family is just dreaming.

You are right now in the most crucial years of your life regarding the WORK of making your family dreams come true. You will be confronted this year, maybe this week, with some frank realities that will force you to decide how much your dream really matters to you. Imagine with me a young man your age whom I'll call Jared. Jared's parents had tried to teach him the gospel in their home, but as he got older they felt they hadn't reached him. They dearly wanted him to gain a testimony, go on a mission, and marry in the temple. But Jared wanted to live his own life, and it bugged him that his parents kept asking him about a mission. He enrolled as a freshman in a state college far from home, where he could be his own person and do his own thing. He was tired of seminary and what he called "cheesy Church kids."

Jared loved the freedom of doing whatever he felt like doing. He got involved with the wrong kind of movies, music, dancing and girls. His parents had taught him to make better choices, but he was on his own, and he loved it. Jared began hanging out with a very cute girl I'll call Stephanie. Their relationship got very physical, very fast, and Jared found that exciting.

One night Jared and Stephanie started to become even more intimate together. She was very playful about the whole thing, and Jared gulped as he realized how willing she was. "What if you get pregnant," he asked. She just smiled and said, "I'm on the pill. And if that doesn't work, it's no big deal. I know how to get an abortion."

"An abortion?" Jared asked. "Wait a minute." It hit him like a freight train that they were now talking, even if only hypothetically, about a baby that could be his own child. Suddenly he felt confused and uncomfortable. He was seeing a connection that had somehow escaped him before, a link between sexuality and children--what the scriptures call "posterity." He also felt hurt that what she was willing to do with him, she had probably done with other guys.

"Listen," said Jared. "When you talk about sex, you're really talking about getting married and having kids. And when you talk about families, you're talking about religion. I don't like this, Stephanie. I know where the spirits of babies come from, and I know what sex is supposed to mean. Sorry, but I'm out of here."

Stephanie was shocked. She didn't understand what he was talking about, and she asked him not to push religion on her. Jared didn't think he'd said anything about the church. He was just talking about what seemed right to him. He took her home abruptly, then drove off feeling angry, but not quite sure why. Close to tears, he kept on driving, trying to settle down and clear his head. He kept thinking about what he'd almost done.

After driving around the city for an hour in an aimless sort of way, Jared decided to call his cousin, a returned missionary who was married and attending his same college. He'd seen his cousin once on the campus, but he had passed up the cousin's invitation to come for Sunday dinner. "Look, I know it's late," said Jared, "but I need to talk to you." As they sat together in the cousin's little apartment, Jared told him about Stephanie and that he'd just broken things off with her. Then Jared gave his cousin a very serious look. "You know what," he said, "I need to date active LDS girls who really care about the whole family thing the same way I do. Why couldn't I see that before?"

Now let me compare what happened to Jared with what happened to a lot of people on

September 11. The twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed while a shocked nation watched on television in disbelief. Among so much else that has happened since that awful day, many Americans have begun to re-think their personal values, weighing what matters most against what matters least. That's what Jared was doing.

A few days after the terrorist attack, I listened to a man named Martin Kaplan in a broadcast interview. He said the attack had changed America's entire culture. "We have been living for several generations now in what has loosely been called a post-modern society in which nothing really matters, nothing has meaning, reality or truth. Everything is socially constructed. Suddenly, a plane slams into the World Trade Center and people say, [Wait a minute.] There is reality, there is truth. There are things worth fighting and dying for. There are things that have consequences, things that transcend individuals, parties, even nations or belief systems, that we subscribe to or should subscribe to, a common set of definitions that should not be undermined by the cultural relativism that's held us in its thrall for generations."(7)

I heard the same thought expressed in another interview with some high school students. A reporter was asking them if they would now be willing to fight and even die in a war. These kids said the war on terrorism was forcing them to define what they value. The clear-cut evil of this enemy has defined right and wrong so clearly that almost all of them were ready to go to war if need be. What a contrast with the era of the Vietnam war, when some anti-war protesters held up a sign that said, "Nothing is worth dying for"

If we're more clear now about what is worth dying for, are we more clear about what is worth living for? I recently heard another reporter who said he had asked a number of Americans what was the main change in their lives since September 11. Their most common answer was, "I have been saying 'I love you' a lot more to the people I care about the most." We give our lives for what we believe, what we value, and whom we love. We give our lives to those causes a day, even an hour, at a time. What Jared realized that night was that he was about to give a big chunk of his life, his procreative power of posterity, to a senseless, even an evil cause. And he awoke to claim the testimony he didn't know he had. His heart was telling him things his mind did not yet clearly know.

He was like Amulek, who said, "I did harden my heart, for I was called many times and I would not hear; therefore I knew concerning these things, yet I would not know; therefore I went on rebelling against God." (Alma 10:6) What then got Amulek's attention was a vision from an angel. What got Jared's attention was a vision from evil. What has our nation's attention is another evil vision.

So now the question for all of us is the one Elder Henry B. Eyring asked at October Conference about all the people who've started praying since the terrorist attack. "I hope the change lasts," said Elder Eyring. His concern, and mine, is that, as Mormon wrote, "Except the Lord doth chasten his people with many afflictions [and] visit them with . . . terror . . . they will not remember him." (Hel. 12:3)

Can WE remember Him? Can we remember our vision of being with the man or woman we love, with our children, and with the Lord, forever? I wish you would close your eyes and see yourself in white, kneeling at a holy altar in a temple. Then imagine the two you, like Adam and Eve, holding each other and walking back together into God's presence. Can you see it? Can you remember this picture with enough power to live for it and work for it, this week and next month? This vision is worth really living for, a day at a time, an hour at a time.

Too many Latter-day Saints today somehow believe they can have one hand touching the walls of the temple and the other hand touching the unclean things of the world. We cannot do that. As Alma said, "touch not their unclean things." (Alma 5: ) I plead with you, put both hands on the temple. Put your arms around the temple, and hang on. That is how you must hold on to your family dream. If you don't, the tigers will come at night and tear your dreams apart.

As I think of Jared's story, I want to share one specific example about not touching the unclean things of the world. In dating and hanging out, even when you feel there is a growing foundation of true love in a relationship, show your profound respect for that love - and for the doctrines about eternal love and family life -- by restraining your passions. Please don't be deceived by the false idea that anything short of the sex act itself is okay. That is a lie, not only because one step overpoweringly leads to another, but because even touching another person's body with sexual intent is part of the intimacy that is kept holy by the sanctuary of chastity. Please also beware of unnatural sexual behaviour that is just as immoral, if not worse, than traditional fornication or adultery. If for any reason you think you may have dashed your own hopes by a past mistake, I testify of Christ's atonement and the power of complete and honest repentance.

Now let us return once more to our vision of family life. I want to share with you an experience that comes back to me, being here in Rexburg in the fall. On a bright fall afternoon some years ago, I went fishing not far from here with my seven-year old son, Mark. As I splashed up the shallow stream in my waders, I carried him on my back. He held his feet above the water and hugged me tight around the neck, laughing in my ear when I would stumble on the rocks; he said he hoped we'd fall into the water.

We stopped at one spot to fish. I soon looked up at the clear blue sky, almost tasting the crisp fall air. I saw early snow on a distant mountain peak. I drank in the color of autumn leaves in the backlighting of the sun. I saw Mark downstream, skipping rocks on the water. The sun caught the pure whiteness of his blond hair, and his agile form stood out against the shadows of the wooded background.

I felt a sudden rush of feeling that I suppose only a father or mother can know. My heart reached out to touch him as the thought struck me, that he is my son, my own little boy, my posterity, and I am his dad. He is filled with a child's love. I am responsible to God for my conduct as his father. He and I are sealed together, if we are faithful. He is the fruit of the deep love I feel for his mother. The constancy of her daily life is teaching him the way of truth and light. That's why he is so secure, so mentally healthy. Thank God for such a child. What miracles are worked by the laws of nature and of nature's God. In that moment, I felt in harmony with everything I saw. It was a witness to me of the Lord's love.

I promise you that you can experience the fulfilment of your desire for eternal love, if you really want it, so long as you don't want anything else more. I pray that you will do the work required to fulfill your family dream. The longing of the heart for this fulness is a source of great power, even on-especially on-those cloudy days, or years, when your dreams seem impossible. Your longing to belong forever to a loving family comes from God, and He has promised its fulfillment, if you are faithful: "For he satisfieth the longing soul and filleth the hungry soul with goodness." (Psalms 107:9) You can live happily ever after, for the Lord God has spoken it. I know His promise is sure.

I close with the last verse of the opening hymn we sang today. I didn't know we were going to sing this, but it fits our topic perfectly, especially this close to Thanksgiving. In act two of our three-act play, these words can mean so much. We sang, "For the joy of human love,/ Brother, sister, parent, child./ Friends on earth and friends above,/ For all gentle thoughts and mild,/ Lord of all, to thee we raise/ This our hymn of grateful praise."

I testify to you that feeling human love, even when love hurts you and your heart feels broken, those feelings are God-given. They are the motivation that will take us back to Him. I testify of their source. I testify that He will help us fulfill our longing. It is a central vision of the gospel. May God bless us, every day, with the strength to remember the vision and do the work, I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

1. Church News, Oct. 3, 1998, p. 6.
2. McDannell and Lang,Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19 ), .
3. Ibid. at .
4. Ibid. at .
5. Dallin H. Oaks, "Why We Must Act to Preserve the Families of the World," unpublished manuscript, World Family Policy Forum, Brigham Young University, Jan. 15, 1999.
6. Man's Search for Meaning(New York: Washington Square Press, 1959), pp. xiii, 58-59.
7. Minnesota Public Radio's "Marketplace" program on Public Radio International, Sept. 27, 2001, played on KUED in Salt Lake City.

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