Persuasion and Long-Suffering

I had an interesting experience in the temple yesterday morning that has caused me some pondering.  I participated in the initiatory ordinances, and after I was assigned a booth to go to I walked over to it and sat down outside of it waiting for the person ahead of me to start.  Suddenly a temple worker walked over to me quickly and exclaimed impatiently, as if I broken some very important rule, “What are you doing?! Get in there!”  I was rather taken aback as I followed these orders and joined the other man in the booth.  My initial feeling was to be offended at this man’s rudeness to speak so forcefully and order me around like that—this was the house of the Lord we were in.  As I stood there pondering and trying not to be upset, the though struck me that my own home is also supposed to be like a temple.  Sometimes my communication with my children is not altogether different from the way this man had spoken to me.  I often try to command them as if getting their homework done or brushing their teeth or getting to bed is some urgent thing that must be done now—an urgency they don’t see.  I too often forget that the kind of language prescribed by the Lord is to speak “by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; By kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile” (D&C 121:41-42).  That is how we ought to speak to our children. 

               Perhaps part of the reason I had those thoughts in the temple was because I had just listened to a talk by then Elder Nelson in which he told this parenting story.  He got home from work and told his wife he would get their youngest to bed.  He recounted, “I offered to get our four-year-old ready for bed. I began to give the orders: ‘Take off your clothes; hang them up; put on your pajamas; brush your teeth; say your prayers’ and so on, commanding in a manner befitting a tough sergeant in the army. Suddenly she cocked her head to one side, looked at me with a wistful eye, and said, ‘Daddy, do you own me?’”  He summarized what he learned this way: “She taught me an important lesson. I was using coercive methods on this sweet soul. To rule children by force is the technique of Satan, not of the Savior. No, we don’t own our children. Our parental privilege is to love them, to lead them, and to let them go.”  While it is true that in the scriptures the Lord sometimes commands with language such as “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not,” we are not the Lord and don’t have the prerogative to order others around, even for those who are in our stewardship.  The Psalmist said it well in this verse: “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger” (Proverbs 15:1).  It is love that has the power to motivate and change hears and actions; anger’s effect may be immediate but the result is far less permanent.  Joseph Smith put it this way: “When persons manifest the least kindness and love to me, O what power it has over my mind, while the opposite course has a tendency to harrow up all the harsh feelings and depress the human mind.” 

               My small experience being on the other side of a commanding order helped me to put into perspective how my children may feel when I fail to include gentleness and tenderness in my speech to them.  As parents we have to remember that we don’t own our children—they are the Lord’s—and they understand the tone of our voice far better than the words we speak.  We should seek to communicate as Alma encouraged the saints of Gideon: “Be humble, and be submissive and gentle; easy to be entreated; full of patience and long-suffering; being temperate in all things” (Alma 7:23).