The Power of Love

Elder Warner of the 70 came a few years ago to our Stake Conference.  He spoke 
of the power of loving our children.  When we meet them with love, the Spirit will be 
present.  The Spirit can whisper the needed course correction directly to the child’s 
spirit.  Because our love invites The Holy Ghost, our child can have Truths plopped 
directly into his or her Belief Boxes!  Remember from the mind chapter that this is 
exactly what we want. As we love our children, God can take care of what needs to 
happen at the root level to change our child at the “Actions/Behaviors” level simply 
by our willingness to love them.  

Here is a perfect time to put in one more plug for charity in our interactions with others.  
As we seek to be filled with charity rather than trying to love a child in our own strength 
who quite frankly, can behave in ways that may make it seem difficult to love them, 
we can love them as God loves them.  We may have moments where we know it’s 
God’s love and not our own. We may also have times where being filled with charity 
is a gradual process. Regardless of how it comes, we must seek for the power of 
His love in our parenting moments in order to truly minister in parenting.

We can see our child through His eyes and this desire can give way to other spiritual 
gifts such as the ability to discern what is happening beneath the radar---to read 
between the lines---and truly understand our child and where he is coming from.  
This is critical because we are then able to discern how to point him to Christ at the 
root level based on what we are seeing at the surface level.

Listen to these beautiful words penned by one of my dearest friends who has also 
struggle deeply in parenting!  This poem is used with permission.

The Fierce Elixir by Dee Mattix

Perhaps my children deserved better

than this, my wet-dog launch from a rescue canoe,

this embarrassing spectacle with flotsam in its teeth

ushering them towards a less precarious adulthood

than my own. Heaven knows

it’s taken decades to steady myself, after surviving

the gauntlet of my own childhood. Now these,

my tagalong beloved brood, so highly cherished,

grow like wildflowers cast by a random hand.

And they are bruised, despite my heroic trying.

There have been nights I’ve driven spikes of memory

through my palms, seeking penance

for the ways I know I’ve failed them.

And days my heart, at a thought, will crack wide open

like a gull’s egg fallen from a cliff to the rocks below—

a broken promise carried away on saline tides of retribution.

But love has been my fierce elixir, the fire within my veins.

I’d have sold my soul thrice over just to know

it would burn bright enough

to purge ancestral demons

outrun the wolves

or call down manna to heal their souls.

I feel unseemly as I reach to chisel out their captive marble wings,

only to find they’ve already flown from their pedestals.

How could these, quarried up, have come from such as I?

They shimmer in the moonlight, luminesce in the sun.

The light flows from their fingers, bathing the faces

of their young, who turn to me

not cumbered by the woundings of our past,

And call me

Blessed…       

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