A Quiver Full

When I told someone recently that I had five children, all of whom are relatively young, he responded with the common quip, “Do you realize they know what causes that?!”  The attitude behind this statement seems to be the general feeling of the world in our generation, that children are a kind of burden on adults and we should seek to avoid them or at least minimize how many we invite into our homes.  But as I sit alone in a hotel in a foreign country, thousands of miles away from my children and their mother, I realize just how unfulfilling my life would be without them.  To paraphrase John, “I have no greater joy” than, with my wife, to hear my eight-year-old’s unrestrained excitement, my six-year-old’s unrepressed laughter, my four-year-old’s imaginative adventures, my two-year-old’s exclamations of “Daddy!”, and my four-month-old’s precious little calls to his mother (3 John 1:4). 

               Surely to have children is a great sacrifice, and to quote a story from Elder Anderson, “It’s no picnic!”  As I once saw on a sticker: “You can’t scare me—I have children!”  In other words, if you have experienced raising children, then there are few other difficulties that would frighten you.  Despite the great challenges, frustrating moments, and occasional times I feel like throwing in the towel as a parent, though, the serious thought of having to live without any of my own children is unthinkable.  No matter how many children parents have, the loss or pain or serious struggle of any one of them leads a loving parent to cry out like David who lost his son Absalom: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”  Surely, as Elder Anderson declared, the “decision of how many children to have and when to have them is between husband and wife and the Lord,” but I hope we see them as the great blessing that they are and not as a burden to bear in between more fulfilling pursuits of work and play.  I believe as the Psalmist did: “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.  As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.  Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them” (Psalms 127:3-5).   

               Of course, there are many couples who cannot have children but who desire them with all their hearts.  Yesterday I met a wonderful, faithful husband and wife at the temple from Taiwan and China, who are without children and yet who were waiting on the Lord for that blessed day to come.  In the scriptures those without children similarly longed for them.  Rachel said to Jacob when she was barren: “Give me children, or else I die” (Genesis 30:1).  Hannah poured out her soul to God when she was unable to have children: “She was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the Lord, and wept sore” (1 Samuel 1:10).  Zacharias and Elizabeth prayed for a child until they were “well stricken in years” (Luke 1:7).  For all three of those women their longed-for child did come finally through the grace of God.  We don’t know how long it will take for the Lord to grant our righteous desires, but His promises are sure, and in the end we know that “he granteth unto men according to their desire” (Alma 29:4).  Whether in this life or the next, if we so desire, our quiver will indeed be full.  And there is nothing to compare with the happiness those arrows will bring.