Heavenly Parents Means Heavenly Parenting
By Emma Freestone Erickson
My baby's cries pierce my heart. They wrap my arms around him, bounce my legs, and open my lips to sing love songs close to his little ears. My heart beat gets faster and I work faster to grab the first pair of shoes I see, wiggle my baby into the baby carrier, and walk toward my favorite place—the path by the river.
Soon my baby is peacefully asleep hugging my chest and I have time to think while I walk. My breathing and footsteps settle into a rhythm while my thoughts settle into a rhythm of two-things-are-true.
I love my baby and I love being a mother more than I can possibly express and this is stretching my soul. The most whole, alive, joyful, urgent, and serene love sits side by side with the most all-encompassing and sometimes painful transformation of my life, mind, heart, body, time, and priorities. The joy floats and dances above me and in me while I pull the heaviness along.
It’s time for me to share my heart and mind with heaven.
I believe that Jesus understands me more than I can understand. As Relief Society President Chieko Okazaki said, “There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20)”
I also believe that our Heavenly Parents must understand me more than I can understand, and our Heavenly Mother must understand motherhood more than I can understand. She must in some way personally know pregnancy, birth, nursing, newborns, and the fire-filled feeling of your own baby’s cry for you. She shares the love I feel for my baby and sees me in all the wonder and chaos and sees herself there as well. So, I am grateful to have Jesus as well as a heavenly father and mother.
The gospel topics essay on a Mother in Heaven describes belief in her as “cherished among latter-day saints” and in this moment I am cherishing that belief. How reassuring to believe that in my efforts to mother, I am being mothered, not only by my mother on earth but by my mother in heaven.
As Harold B. Lee said, “Sometimes we think the whole job is up to us, forgetful that there are loved ones beyond our sight who are thinking about us and our children. We forget that we have a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother who are even more concerned, probably, than our earthly father and mother, and that influences from beyond are constantly working to try to help us.”
And as John A. Widstoe said, “The glorious vision of life hereafter . . . is given radiant warmth by the thought that . . . [we have] a mother who possesses the attributes of Godhood.”
Life on Earth is also given radiant warmth by the thought of that mother.
I continue my walk by the river remembering my divine family and feeling a bit warmer and lighter and at least watched over instead of lonely.
If we have eternal parents we must be eternally loved. We must be divinely loved by divine parents, and perfectly, wholly, and completely loved by perfect, whole, and complete parents. We must be attentively listened to and carefully cared for. Our heavenly parents must care for us in a heavenly way. They must nourish us when we are hungry, touch us when we reach out, and hold us when we cry.
Maybe something in their perfected bodies and hearts reacts with compassion when we react with pain to life happening around us and to us and something in them fills with brimming love and deep contentment and awe at our being, our growth, and our discovery of the goodness in life and in love.
Emmanuel means God with us. Heavenly parents means heavenly parenting.
Open your heart to the presence and parenting of God. Let yourself be a small, imperfect, growing child who needs their mother and father and who needs to be loved. Let yourself receive them. Be part of a gorgeous and immense heavenly family that fills time and space. Let your parents’ love and wisdom guide and fill you as you grow and then turn and share with the waiting world.
“If we . . . can love so much and try so hard, what does that say of a more Godly love that differs from our own as the stars differ from the sun? On a particularly difficult day, . . . what would this world’s inhabitants pay to know that heavenly parents are reaching across those same streams and mountains and deserts, anxious to hold them close?” -Elder Jeffrey R. Holland
“Our theology begins and ends with heavenly parents. Our highest aspiration is to be like them.“ -Elder Dallin H. Oaks
“When our rising love and joyful gratitude meet the shower of mercy and love from the Savior and from our heavenly parents, in that contact is the pure radiance and the brilliant light of glory.” - Sister Chieko Okazaki