From the book ‘This Day and Always’ teaching about ‘Family’ by Lloyd D. Newell and the Spoken Word:
A woman accustomed to affluence once traveled to a foreign land. While there she was invited into what most from her circumstances would have considered a mere hovel—a one room dwelling with no running water, a single light bulb, and an open fire upon which the family cooked their meals.
Despite such conditions, the visitor later observed: “There was a special feeling there. The room was clean. The bare cement floor was spotless and . . . colorfully painted dishes lined the shelves. . . . Even though poor, [this family] had created an environment in which special warmth and goodness could grow and thrive.” 1
Despite the pressures we often feel to the contrary, a home is not made up of possessions we spend so much of our energy pursuing. Rather, a home is built of relationships based on love, trust and mutual support; as children learn from such examples; and as parents and children take time to play together, to talk with one another, to share in the many individual activities that sometimes can pull a family apart.
One young mother told her own father—a well known overworked government official who stuck his head into her bedroom to say goodnight late one evening. As he asked her in passing how everything was going, he sensed that all was not well with his teenage daughter so he went into her room, sat with her and listened as she talked at length about all the problems she was facing at school and with her friends.
Though he probably could have justified leaving to attend to weightier matters—or simply to get the sleep he so sorely needed—he stayed with her and listened long into the night. “I don’t really remember what he even said,” the daughter later recalled, “except that he loved me and that I was a wonderful person—when I really wasn’t . . . being the nicest person in the world to be around.” 2
Some of us, sadly, work unceasingly to pay for our homes and all that goes in them, forgetting as we do that what goes on in our homes is far more important than what goes into our houses. Perhaps, as we remember that love can abound in any abode, we will increasingly have as our foremost concern providing our families with an environment that will lift the souls of all who dwell therein.
~Lloyd D. Newell, This Day and Always (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 1999):
1.Sherrie Johnson, Spiritually Centered Motherhood (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1983), 81 2. BYU Today, vol. 43, no. 4 July 1989):42.
