What is Family Home Evening

Leaders of The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-Day Saints have instructed members to set aside Monday night as "family home evening." This is a time for families to study the gospel together and to do other activities that strengthen the family spiritually, create family memories, and increase unity and love. To learn more visit this website.

Why Family Home Evening

"I wonder if having unplanned and infrequent family home evenings will be enough to fortify ourselves and our children with sufficient moral strength to meet the complexities of our day. Infrequent family scripture study may be inadequate to arm ourselves and our children with the virtue necessary to withstand the moral decay of the environment in which we live. Where in the world will we learn chastity, integrity, honesty, and basic human decency if not at home? These values will, of course, be reinforced at church, but teaching them in family home evening can be particularly consistent and effective. To combat the world's evil influences, we need the strength that comes from family home evening."

James E. Faust, “Enriching Our Lives through Family Home Evening,” Ensign, Jun 2003, 2–6

Monday, December 22, 2008

Lessons From Liberty Jail

Last weeks FHE was the CES Fireside talk by Jeffrey R. Holland that he gave in September 2008. We watched the actual video from this site. You can read the transcript from this PDF link. I would highly recommend watching the talk first, though. Nothing beats the feeling of compassion and the Spirit when he talks nor hearing from his lips the special blessing he gives "as if my hands were on your head." This is a talk that I will want to always keep on hand and read when I'm going through a difficult time, when I feel alone in my struggles, or when I'm tempted to be vengeful or angry because someone has done me wrong.

Three Lessons From Liberty Jail:
1. Everyone faces trying times.
2. Even the worthy will suffer
3. Remain calm, patient, charitable, and forgiving

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the talk:
[A] spiritual experience, revelatory experience, sacred experience can come to every one of us in all the many and varied stages and circumstances of our lives.

You can have sacred, revelatory, profoundly instructive experience with the Lord in the most miserable experiences of your life—in the worst settings, while enduring the most painful injustices, when facing the most insurmountable odds and opposition you have ever faced… Every one of us, in one way or another, great or small, dramatic or incidental, is going to spend a little time in Liberty Jail—spiritually speaking.

These difficult lessons teach us that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity, and if we will be humble and faithful, if we will be believing and not curse God for our problems, He can turn the unfair and inhumane and debilitating prisons of our lives into temples—or at least into a circumstance that can bring comfort and revelation, divine companionship and peace.

Jesus, in the course of the Atonement, experienced all of the heartache and sorrow, all of the disappointments and injustices that the entire family of man had experienced and would experience from Adam and Eve to the end of the world in order that we would not have to face them so severely or so deeply. However heavy our load might be, it would be a lot heavier if the Savior had not gone that way before us and carried that burden with us and for us.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Erika - I came across your blog today and read your post about Elder Holland's comments. Like you, I am very grateful for what he had to teach us. Although I don't have much to add, I've left my own comments at the end of my post on Lessons from Liberty Jail.

BTW - I really like your blog and admire what you are doing!