Delivered by Nancy Harward in a sacrament meeting of the Montgomery Ward, Cincinnati Ohio East Stake, on 14 May 2023: Mother’s Day
When Jonathan asked me to speak today, he did not assign me a topic. However, given the occasion, I assumed that I should prepare a message that related to motherhood in some way, so I began reading others’ talks on the subject, gathering relevant scriptures and quotations, considering possibilities for the various directions I might take, and praying for inspiration. Nothing seemed to gel. Then last Sunday, my almost-thirteen-year-old granddaughter told me that she was preparing a talk to give today in the sacrament meeting of her Pennsylvania ward. “I’m supposed to talk about how honoring our mothers can help us become more like Christ,” she said. Suddenly, the inchoate mass of ideas and material I had collected began to form a clear path in front of me. If Emily was going to speak about how honoring mothers helps us become more like Christ, then I would speak about how honoring our responsibility as mothers—and others—to nurture and teach God’s children can help us become more like our Heavenly Parents.
Russell M. Nelson once taught that “to help another human being reach one’s celestial potential is part of [our] divine mission.” He reminded us that “The Lord said, ‘My work and my glory [is] to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.’[i] So His devoted [disciples] may truly say, ‘My work and my glory is to help my loved ones reach that heavenly goal.’” [ii]
When I was a young mother my work was seldom glorious, and I wasn’t always convinced that I was getting closer to reaching my own celestial potential, let alone helping anyone else along a similar path.
I well recall attending fast and testimony meeting in the Charlottesville (Virginia) Second Ward on New Year’s Day 1984. Michael had spent the first part of the meeting—including the administration of the sacrament—sitting on the organ bench, while I sat on a side row near the front of the chapel with our two small children. One of these had been born only five weeks earlier, and the other was an active two-year-old who seemed diabolically intent on preventing me from having a worshipful experience that day. He wasn’t making enough noise to bother others around us, but he was really bothering me: climbing over my legs, tugging on my arm, dumping out the contents of my purse, and poking the baby. Michael finally came down to join us as others began stepping up to the microphone to bear their testimonies, and I hoped that my husband might now take steps to exorcize the demon who had taken possession of our toddler. But Michael just sat there listening to the speakers, entirely unfazed. I was livid. After a few more minutes of exasperation, I handed the baby to Michael, grabbed her bothersome brother by the arm, and dragged him into the foyer, where I began lecturing him about the impropriety of his behavior.
It wasn’t long before I realized that my words were having absolutely no effect, which only increased my irritation. When Michael came out to the foyer a while later he found me trying to forcibly restrain a child who was kicking my thighs and butting his head against my chin. He asked, “What are you doing?”
I said, “I am trying to teach Soren how to be reverent.”
He stared at me, shaking his head, and then said, “Nancy, he’s only two years old.”
At that moment I realized that in an effort to teach my toddler to act like a grownup, I had been acting just as impatient and childish as he. I was grateful for a husband who understood little children better than I, and for a Heavenly Father who just smiled at my immaturity as a mother and let me learn from the experience.
In the forty years since that incident, I’ve learned more about children and more about patience. Some of the eight- and nine-year-olds in my Primary class are bursting with energy and enthusiasm, launching their hands into the air and/or blurting out the answer every time I ask a question. They can’t wait to share what they know—or what they think they know—and they are unafraid to ask about whatever they don’t know. Others participate only when coaxed. Each child is unique, but all of them crave recognition of one kind or another. At this point in their lives, they probably don’t think much about achieving their celestial potential, but my teaching partner, Barbara Poe, and I try to help them understand that they are God’s children, and that they are loved.
The kids in my current Primary class are easy to love, but some of those I have been called to teach in the past posed challenges I struggled to overcome. I’m not sure I ever broke through the barriers to reach a few kids with severe autism and developmental challenges. Certainly they had as much celestial potential as anyone else, but I wasn’t sure how to communicate that to them. I wasn’t sure how to communicate anything to them. The best I could do was try to bring the Spirit into the classroom and hope those kids could feel it.
Keeping the Spirit there was sometimes hard when a few class members seemed determined to drive it away. Twenty years ago, I had a couple of seminary students who regularly disrupted my lessons by constantly talking to each other, cracking jokes at inappropriate times, and asking questions designed to derail the discussion. The more obnoxious of the two attended only sporadically, so on days when he was absent, the other would put his head down on the table and fall asleep, snoring loudly. If someone woke him up, he would become surly, which was worse than the snoring. I was sure that neither of them was gaining anything from attending seminary, so I could hardly wait for them to graduate from high school and get out of my class.
I wasn’t surprised when the surly snorer went on a mission because his parents had been so eager for him to do so, but I was surprised when, after he’d been in the field a few months, his mother told me that he had written a letter home advising his younger brother to study the scriptures and pay attention in church—especially in seminary. “I wish I had taken seminary seriously because I wouldn’t have had so much catching up to do,” he wrote. “I’d be a much better missionary now if I’d read my scriptures and listened to my teachers before I got to the MTC.” That young man worked hard to catch up. He returned from his mission with honor and then married a woman who had served in the same mission. They now have five children, and last year they established a charitable organization to aid refugees from the country where they served. And what about his more obnoxious friend? He also served a mission, has a family, and is an executive of a company dedicated to providing reliable financial services to people with unstable incomes and lives.
There was a girl in that same seminary class who usually came in about ten minutes before the closing prayer. I’ll call her Katherine Miller. I knew she had arrived at the church early enough to come in more or less on time because her sister usually came in well ahead of her, but Katherine always went straight to the restroom, where she spent the next half hour doing her hair and makeup. She made a half-hearted effort to make up the work she had missed, but it seemed obvious that her primary concern was not learning about the scriptures but attracting boys. Katherine couldn’t bear to live without a boyfriend, so I wasn’t surprised when she failed to wait for the missionary to whom she was all but engaged and married somebody else before he got home. I was surprised, however, when some years later, an old friend mentioned that she’d learned that the Young Women president in her California ward, Kate Sayers, was one of my former seminary students.
“Kate Sayers. Kate Sayers. Who could that be?” I thought. Then it came to me. “Oh! You mean Katherine Miller! She’s your Young Women president?”
“Yes,” said my friend, “and she’s great! She’s so creative, and the girls love her because she really knows how to relate to them. She’s been a real blessing to our ward.”
I have to admit that when these young people were in my seminary class, I had a hard time seeing their celestial potential—but the Lord didn’t. He understood that some mortal teenagers take longer than others to mature, spiritually as well as physically and emotionally. Fortunately, my once-recalcitrant students had been blessed with diligent parents who recognized the seeds of divinity within their sons and daughter and tried to faithfully fulfill their “sacred duty” as outlined in the Family Proclamation: “to teach [their children] to love and serve one another, observe the commandments of God, and be law-abiding citizens wherever they live.”[iii]
That mandate describes how to set children on the path toward exaltation. But consider that in this month’s Come, Follow Me reading assignments, we read passages in which Jesus explained that the way to reach our celestial potential is to become like little children, “for of such is the kingdom of God.”[iv]
Sometimes I have to wonder whether Christ really wants us to become like the little children who test their parents’ patience during sacrament meeting. But when I consider what he said more seriously, I think about the virtues of the little children I have known—exuberance; honesty; readiness to forgive; pure, unmitigated love—and how my interactions with children and youth have helped me come closer to reaching my own celestial potential.
My granddaughter Emily, the one who also had a speaking assignment today, is one of the friendliest people I know. A few weeks ago, Michael and I went with her and her family to a high school play held in a 4,000-seat auditorium. The event was sold out, so it was hard to move through the crowd, but that didn’t discourage Emily from seeking out anyone she recognized—classmates, neighbors, former teachers, even a local store clerk— so she could greet them with an enthusiastic wave. And if she could worm her way close enough, she’d give them a hug. Emily is also a very caring individual. If she sees a crying child alone at church, she will take the little one by the hand and go in search of the parent. I’ve seen Emily go out of her way to alert the owner of a dog on the loose in her neighborhood, concerned that the animal would be hit by a car. Emily inspires me to be more outgoing, more aware of others’ needs, and more willing to act on impulses to serve.
Sometimes the children we’ve done our best to nurture cause us heartache and pain, and I can tell you that there is nothing harder than that to bear. But I find comfort in a statement by Orson F. Whitney, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles during the first decades of the twentieth century. He said: “All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, … and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in Heaven.”[v]
I am grateful for the opportunity my Heavenly Parents have given me and my siblings in our vast, eternal family to nurture and be nurtured, to teach and be taught by one another. I’m grateful for an older brother who endured incomparable heartache and pain so that through him, all of us can reach our celestial potential. I am grateful for the Holy Spirit that comforts us and testifies of truth, and pray that you have felt his presence here today.
[i] Moses 1:39.
[ii] Russell M. Nelson, “Woman—of Infinite Worth,” General Conference, October 1989.
[iii] “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” ¶ 6.
[iv] Mark 10:14; see also Matthew 18:3.
[v] Orson F. Whitney, quoted by Spencer W. Kimball in Faith Precedes the Miracle, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co. 1972, 98.
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