Teaching Optional

Wondering if Elder Holland had said anything about whether teaching is an essential part of Home and Visiting Teaching, I reviewed his talk and found that teaching is, in fact, optional. He said that "a monthly visit in each home is still the ideal the Church would strive for," and that we have a "scriptural mandate to 'visit the house of each member,'" but it would seem that visiting is the essential element, and teaching isn't.

The closest he got to talking about teaching was when he suggested sending messages to those we are unable to visit:

To help address special needs, we might send a scriptural quote or a line from a general conference talk or a Mormon Message drawn from the wealth of material on LDS.org.

 Of course, teaching gospel messages while we do our Home and Visiting Teaching is still a good idea. We are to uplift and help each other in any way(s) we can, and teaching uplifting and ennobling messages can help with that. But I had always thought that Home Teaching meant sharing the First Presidency Message out of the latest Ensign, and now that I've learned that Home Teaching actually means something completely different, I thought I'd share that with all of you.

Like I said the other day, teaching gospel-themed messages is not the most important part of Home and Visiting Teaching, and now I've learned that it's not even important at all. What is important is that we reach out to our families in love, and visit them in their homes at least once a month, or however often we can. What's important is that we love them and that they know that we love them. Gospel messages are wonderful, and sharing such messages with our families can be a great way to show that we care for them, but there are better ways to do that, and if all we're doing for our families is teaching them messages, we could be doing better. Yet, if our Home and Visiting Teaching families know that we love them and that we're watching out for them, we're doing pretty well as Home and Visiting Teachers, whether we're actually teaching them anything or not.