Now that I've gotten passed the distractions of feminism on Facebook and grounding rods with Dad, here's what I originally planned on blogging about concerning the primary song I shared two days ago (and will share again right now in case it's too inconvenient for you to go back to the blog post of two days ago to listen to it again).
I especially love the refrain, "God gave us families to help us become what He wants us to be." In families, we can learn to develop Christlike attributes, like patience, love, service, and wisdom. Also, as we become better children for our parents and better parents for our kids, we learn ways to become better children of our Heavenly Father, and parents learn skills that'll make them better Heavenly Parents as well. Families seem to be all about education for eternity. Our interactions with our kids and parents help us understand God's interactions with us.
God ultimately wants us to become like He is, but that can be a difficult concept for a lot of people because we're not too sure what God is like. Very few people have ever seen Him, and of those, even fewer are alive on the Earth today. The scriptures show Him both as a merciless god of justice and a freely-forgiving god of mercy. Our own attempts to describe Him don't make understanding Him any easier, claiming that He's large enough to fill the expanse of the universe, but also small enough to dwell within our hearts. The best way to describe Him, not surprisingly, comes from the title He chose for Himself: Father.
We may not see God very often (though some of us have conversations with Him on a frequent basis), so it's sometimes hard to understand who He is and what He's like, but we frequently see other fathers - some of us even become fathers or mothers - so we can begin to understand His love for us, how His love interacts with His justice and mercy, how He feels when we do things that are right or wrong, and other aspects of His character that stem out of His paternal love for us.
As our Father, God loves us and wants what's best for us. He also wants us to grow to become more like Him. Sometimes, He comforts us (fathers can be tender at times), and sometimes, He has to correct us (which is usually the father's job). Just about all that God ever does, He does out of His love for us and His desire to watch us grow, and those two things are better understood when we understand His relationship to us as our Father.
It's hard for me to convey the feelings I had as I heard this song in Primary last Sunday. Mostly, I felt my Father's love for me and His desire for me to grow into just as strong and good of a man as He is. Thinking about how perfect He is and how imperfect I am, I see that I have a long way to go, but that's the feeling any young boy has when he looks up to his father as the ideal man. It's true that I have a lot of learning and growing to do, but God knows that the potential is in me, and that, in time, I can become like Him - a feat which seems impossible to me now.
And I know that the feelings He has for me are the same feelings that He has for everyone. We are all His children, and He wants each one of us to become more like Him, and since we can understand that "like Him" roughly means "like an ideal parent," it gives us a better understanding of what kinds of attributes and traits we should try to develop, and in our own families is the perfect place to develop those traits. I'm going to try to be a good child to my Heavenly Father by trying to be a good child to my parents, and I'm going to try to be like my Heavenly Father when I become a father myself. It's not going to be easy, no worthwhile endeavor ever is, but it's something I can shoot for, and since I can understand this goal, I'm more likely to achieve it.
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