My Mother's Day Talk

Good Afternoon, brothers and sisters.

For those who may not know us, I am Liesl Buskirk. My husband Allen and I met in a BYU singles ward. He decided to ask me out after I gave a talk in Sacrament Meeting on sacrifice. I like to joke that he thought to himself, “Look! A girl who knows all about giving things up! That’s exactly what I need.” We moved back to Provo about 4 years ago after living in Boston during his graduate training. He teaches Biochemistry at BYU and I make sure that we’re all alive at the end of the day. We’ve got 4 daughters Sarah (7), Ella (4), Kate (2), and Leah (4 mo) -- which is lots of fun now and will almost certainly qualify us for exaltation if we survive their teenage years unscathed.

I’ve been asked to speak today on virtue. Many times when we think about virtue it is tied to the idea of chastity or moral purity. “The price of a virtuous woman is far above rubies,” it states in Proverbs (31:10). Yet, virtue has a much more nuanced meaning as you follow it through the scriptures. It implies purity and goodness. In 1 Corinthians we learn that the great Christian virtues are faith, hope, and charity (13:13). Virtue is also the word used to describe the power of the Savior to heal. In Mark 5 we read about the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s cloak as he walked in a crowd, “And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?” (v30). In Luke 6, “the whole multitude sought to touch him: for there went virtue out of him, and healed them all” (v19). Alma tells us that since preaching the “word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God” (31:5). This virtue is clearly a concept of great power and strength. It has the power to heal and the power to change lives. In Doctrine & Covenants 121: 45 we’re counseled, “Let thy bowels also be full of charity towards all men, and to the household of faith, and let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from heaven.” When we fill our lives with virtue, we are promised this confidence and knowledge and perhaps even more importantly, our hearts will be full of charity.

About finding this charity, President Monson has taught, “To measure the goodness of life by its delights and pleasures is to apply a false standard. The abundant life does not consist of a glut of luxury. It does not make itself content with commercially produced pleasure, mistaking it for joy and happiness. To find real happiness, we must seek for it in a focus outside ourselves. No one has learned the meaning of living until they have surrendered themselves to the service of others@ (Ensign 3/88).

In Primary this month we are talking about the divinely appointed roles within families. As I experience each new phase of family life – from being a daughter to a wife, and now a mother, I am convinced anew that living in families is God’s plan. For it is within these relationships that we are given the best chance to feel and learn about God’s love. Nowhere else is our patience tried as regularly as it is in everyday dealings with the people closest to us. It is not so difficult most of the time to be pleasant to people you work with or meet socially. But speaking kindly to a child who is whining incessantly, being understanding when your husband is late for dinner on a day when you’re not sure you’ll make it, or responding with patience to a baby who won’t sleep in the night, these truly try our patience. And caring for a loved one who is disabled or chronically ill or giving tough love to a wayward child require reserves of virtue that can only be a gift from God. No less difficult, perhaps especially on Mother’s Day, are the longing to have to a loving family or the unfulfilled desire to become a parent that many face. These trials present the challenge of finding other ways to nurture and can likewise grant opportunities to draw closer to God and to feel his love.

Charity is Christ’s love for us, our love for Him and our love like His. We learn in the book of Moroni that it suffereth long and is still kind (7:45). That in itself is amazing. Nephi tells us it is the highest, noblest, and strongest kind of love and the most joyous to the soul (1 Ne 11). We learn in 2 Nephi that if Adam and Eve had remained in the Garden of Eden, “they would have had no children; … they would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery.” (2 Ne. 2:23.) Note here that if Adam and Eve had had no children, they would have had no misery! But also that without children and misery, they would have had no joy. And Lehi tells us that “men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Ne. 2:25.) Without the trials that come from living in a family, it is difficult to learn to truly love others the way Christ does.

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert discusses his research on what brings satisfaction in life. He says that when people think hypothetically about children “they tend to conjure up images of cooing babies smiling from their bassinets, adorable toddlers running higgledy-piggledy across the lawn, handsome boys and gorgeous girls playing trumpets and tubas in the school marching band, successful college students going on to have beautiful weddings, satisfying careers and flawless grandchildren whose affections can be purchased with candy. Prospective parents know that diapers will need changing, that homework will need doing, and that orthodontists will go to Aruba on their life savings, but by and large, they think quite happily about parenthood, which is why most of them eventually leap into it. When parents look back on parenthood, they remember feeling what those who are looking forward to it expect to feel . . . When people are asked to identify their sources of joy . . . they point to their kids” (220). Yet in numerous studies about the satisfaction people feel in their lives, those interviewed in the actual process of raising children are markedly less happy than those whose children have left home – with particularly low levels for those with preschoolers and, even lower, those with teenagers. Gilbert writes that “none of this should surprise us. Every parent knows that children are a lot of work—a lot of really hard work—and although parenting has many rewarding moments, the vast majority of its moments involve dull and selfless service to people who will take decades to become even begrudgingly grateful for what we are doing” (222). He finds that, in general, parents are “less happy when caring for their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television . . . [that] looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than doing housework”(221). Though I do not doubt his survey results, I believe his analysis is missing something. I hope that the moments of dissatisfaction in motherhood are only sprinkled into days and weeks of enjoying the time we have to spend with our children. If the grumpy times seem to be overtaking the happy ones, I hope that we will pray for help and make changes in our lives to improve things. Surely these trials and struggles can stretch us and enlarge our capacity to love and experience true joy now and later in life.

A friend and I were talking on the phone a few weeks ago and she said that if she’d known what she was getting into before having children she wasn’t sure she’s have been brave enough to go through with it. This seems to be God’s pattern. We make solemn promises first – in choosing to come to earth, at baptism, in the temple, at marriage, in having children – and then we find out what they really entail and what God has in store for us. While this seems at first glance somewhat unfair, it is through trusting in him that we can allow ourselves to be molded into the people he knows we can be. If it were all up to us, we might choose to avoid some of the trials which will bring us the most growth and thereby deprive ourselves of the happiness and virtue that growth can bring.

Many of you may know that Allen’s father passed away earlier this year after a battle with melanoma. His experiences were a powerful testimony to me that our Heavenly Father will give us the capacity to deal with any challenge we’re facing. As we were talking to him at a particularly bleak point in the chemotherapy/radiation cycle he told us something very surprising. He said that while he would never have chosen to get cancer and though he was having a terrible time with medication side effects, there were many tender mercies of the Lord in his life, so many instances where he felt clearly the comforting presence of the spirit and the sure knowledge of God’s very personal, very aware love for him. He felt closer to the Lord in those dark nights of anxiety and insomnia than he ever had before, and that was worth more to him than the suffering had cost.

And while we certainly wouldn’t have chosen to have a new baby come to our family and lose Allen’s dad in the same month, we were also recipients of tender mercies through the hands and hearts of so many people in this ward. We were so touched by the many expressions of sympathy and support we received and were overwhelmed by the many personal and meaningful acts of service we received. We knew we were surrounded by great people in this neighborhood, but during this time we were tutored by many of you who are so skilled in serving others and in discerning needs and ways to help that even we were not aware of. These acts of friendship taught us much about charity – both about God’s love for us and about the ways human love and friendship can be like God’s.

I love a song from the musical Wicked, which says that “people come into our lives for a reason, bringing something we must learn, and we are led to those who help us most to grow if we let them and we help them in return.” I believe that in all of our relationships, if we are prayerful about them, we can find those things that we can learn and God will grant us the virtue, the power and the insight to help others at the same time. Learning this love, the unconditional love of a mother for her child, the boundless love of a Heavenly Father for all of his children is the sure path to exaltation. It is not a qualification for some easy life to come, but the very substance of what that celestial life will be.

Moroni tells us to “pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (7:48) . When He shall appear we shall be like him. Why? Because we shall see him as he is. We gain that sight as we learn to see ourselves and those around us through the lens of his charity, his love. We learn that true happiness does not come from feeling the adulation of others, but from an ever-increasing capacity to love and care for others. This love is given to us by our heavenly father as we strive to follow his son, as we love his children, and serve them as surrogate parents here on earth.

It is my testimony that God loves us. He knows us. And even knowing the end from the beginning as he does, he weeps with us at our sorrows and rejoices with us in our happiness. I know He hears our prayers; I have felt his answering presence and the peace that only comes from his spirit. He wants us to become our best selves. He wants our homes and families to be knit together in love. He will teach us how to love, even in the toughest of situations, if we turn our hearts and prayers to him. As our thoughts and actions are garnished by virtue and our hearts are full of charity, we will be filled with confidence in the presence of God for we shall see Him as He is and we will be like Him. That we can all draw nearer unto Him is my prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.