The Center of Our Existence

Yesterday I started reading the book Le Temps des Amours by Marcel Pagnol, the last book in a series about his childhood.  The first sentence of the book really got me thinking.  The boy was in what is the equivalent of middle school in France, and the book details his experiences there from his perspective.  He wrote, “Ce n’est que bien plus tard que je découvris l’effet le plus surprenant de ma nouvelle vie scolaire: ma famille, ma chère famille, n’était plus le centre de mon existence.” (My translation: “It wasn’t until later that I discovered the most surprising fact of my new scholarly life: my family, my dear family, was no longer the center of my existence.”)  That struck a chord with me, probably because I imagine my own four-year-old son saying that at some point in the future as he decides in his teenage years that his life with friends is more important than his life with family.  For him now, his family is the center of his existence—his best friends are his brother and sister; he spends countless hours learning from and playing with his mom each day; he begs me not to go to work and runs to the door when I return; and he often counts out loud the members of his family, announcing (yet again) how many people we have in the family.  Everything revolves around the family, and that’s how I hope it will continue to be for him for a very long time. 

                I of course want my son to cherish and love and long to be with his family, and even when he gets older and spends more time away from home I hope that we will still be in some way at the center of his life.  As I thought about this, I realized that this is essentially the hope of our Heavenly Father as we come here to earth.  Despite the fact that we are no longer with him, He seeks to draw us back to Him and help us remember that once He was the center of our existence and that we can have that same relationship here on earth.  This is the sense of His words to Enoch: “Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency; And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father” (Moses 7:32-33).  The Lord weeps when we do not choose Him as our Father, when we don’t want our heavenly family to be the center of our existence.  The gospel teaches us to remember where we came from and which home should really matter to us.  Perhaps the hymn O My Father captures how we should feel if we truly understand the plan: “O my Father, thou that dwellest In the high and glorious place, When shall I regain thy presence And again behold thy face?… Yet ofttimes a secret something whispered, ‘You're a stranger here,’ and I felt that I had wandered from a more exalted sphere.”  The world and all it offers is full of distractions that seek to confuse us on where our real home is.  But as Paul taught, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:16-17).  Christ taught us in our dispensation about that heavenly home we can return to: “Let not your hearts be troubled; for in my Father’s house are many mansions, and I have prepared a place for you; and where my Father and I am, there ye shall be also” (D&C 98:18). 

                At the end of Jacob’s writings he gave this surprising summary of their lives, “I conclude this record, declaring that I have written according to the best of my knowledge, by saying that the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream, we being a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness” (Jacob 7:26).  I have to wonder if part of that sorry about being wanderers in the wilderness and cast out from Jerusalem didn’t have to do with a deeper desire to finally go to his heavenly home after so many struggles in mortality.  He knew the plan of salvation as well as any and knew that we could “inherit the kingdom of God” to return to live with God.  We must never forget that we are indeed wanderers on earth and the home we really long for—the desire that should be the center of our existence—is obtained only in choosing the Savior’s way here on earth.