Our Family Journal

It was almost a year ago when my husband and I took some advice and guidance from general conference and applied it to our family. I never thought that a General Conference talk could still impact my life this much a year later. As the first talk in the Sunday Morning session of the October 2007 General Conference of the Church, President Eyring taught the members of the Church by example “to find ways to recognize and remember God’s kindness” (Ensign, Nov. 2007, 67). As President Eyring related to us the account of his first inspiration to begin keeping a family journal and how keeping the family journal was a daily blessing for him as he “became ever more certain that our Heavenly Father hears and answers prayers” and “felt more gratitude for the softening and refining that [came] because of the Atonement of the Savior Jesus Christ,” President Eyring also shared that that his family journal has since been a blessing years later to his sons as “reading of what happened long ago helped [them] notice something God had done in [their] day.”

After hearing President Eyring’s talk, I knew that this was the perfect use for a wedding gift that had been dormant for months. One of my former Young Women’s advisors had given us a beautiful wedding gift: a leather-bound journal with gold-edged pages and an artistically textured cover. She also pasted our wedding announcement in the inside cover of the book to make it especially ours. I knew that such a wonderful gift deserved a wonderful purpose and all summer I had been brainstorming how we could use the journal and put the gift to good use. I toyed with a lot of ideas in my mind, but nothing ever stuck or gave me enough motivation to begin writing in the journal. The summer ended and we were well into autumn before the answer of what to do with the beautiful journal came where I least expected it, in President Eyring’s talk.

After General Conference, my husband and I prayerfully decided that we should follow President Eyring’s example and use our wedding gift to start our own family journal. While President Eyring used his family journal to write down “evidence of what God had done” for his family each day, we decided that we needed to use our family journal to write down a moment when we were happy each day. Every night we take turns and each write a sentence or two in our family journal about a happy event that day. We have found that by writing in our family journal we have been more grateful for the many blessings that Heavenly Father gives us each day. As we approach General Conference this year, I’m excited to have a year’s worth of entries in our family journal. Soon I’ll be able to look back and see what blessings had come into our lives exactly a year ago. This exercise has been important in motivating us to keep important family records and has helped us draw closer as a family as we seek to recognize the daily blessings that the Lord gives to us.

In beginning a family journal of your own, you could do as President Eyring did and ask: “Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?” Or, you could personalize the idea of a family journal and prayerfully adapt it to your own family’s needs. This could mean a happiness journal, a gratitude journal, a journal of family spiritual experiences, or a blessings journal. As you seek his inspiration, the Lord will bless you with promptings of how you can better keep baptismal covenants as a family to always remember him. President Eyring has promised us that as we “will find a way to preserve [memories of God’s messages] for the day that [we], and those that [we] love, will need to remember how much God loves us how much we need Him,” these memories “will soften [our] hearts to allow the Holy Ghost to testify to [us].”

White or Wheat? Whole or Skim?

Even before our wedding day, I knew that all marriages require a certain amount of adjustment, and as I thought about what changes our individual lives would have to make to be compatible with each other and unified as a couple, I felt like I was very prepared for marriage.

In fact, I thought I was ahead of the game. Not only had I already discussed toothpaste and cleaning supplies with my fiancé, but I had paid attention throughout our courtship to our respective food choice habits. Well, actually the differences in our diet where quite obvious: Brian ate white bread and I ate wheat; Brian drank whole milk and I drank skim. Whenever we made dinner together before we were married I solved the problem by always having Brian over to my apartment. He never complained about skim milk and wheat bread at my house, and I was sure that over time he would just get more and more used to my food choices and everything would work out for the healthiest best.

The afternoon following my first trip to the grocery store after we were married spurred a big wake-up call. I was so excited to have done the shopping all by myself and pulled Brian around the kitchen showing him everything I had bought. He approved of my pasta and canned vegetables selection, but when I opened the bread cupboard his face fell. When I opened the fridge I could see the fear of starvation written all over his face.

My face fell too. I couldn’t understand why wheat bread and fat-free milk mattered so much. I had assumed that we were already unified in food choices and that Brian would easily change his habits to match mine, but I was wrong. To temporarily fix the problem, we took another trip to the store later that week and got a second loaf of bread (white) and a second gallon of milk (whole).

It took me that whole first summer and a lot of reflection since to realize that adjustments in marriage were going to take much more work than I had originally thought. The issue wasn’t figuring out everything that we needed to collaborate on; the effort was going to have to come from me. If my marriage was going to be unified and free from contention, I needed to humble myself and make some changes too instead of expecting all the sacrifices to come from my husband. Elder James E. Faust taught what we need to do in order to unify our marriage relationship: “Unity of heart and mind is manifest in sincere expressions of ‘I appreciate you’ and ‘I am proud of you.’ Such domestic harmony results from forgiving and forgetting, essential elements of a maturing marriage relationship. . . . True charity ought to begin in marriage, for it is a relationship that must be rebuilt every day” (Ensign, May 1993, 36).

The more significant changes that came as we became unified as a married couple were much more important than milk or bread. We soon found that we needed to be unified in how we observed the Sabbath day, fast Sunday, Family Home Evening, family prayer, family scripture study, and temple attendance. We learned how to adjust to each other’s needs and habits in all spiritual matters to that we could enrich each other rather than be divided. We especially learned the truth of President Marion G. Romney’s words: “There is but one way that we can be united, that way is to seek the Lord and his righteousness. Unity comes by following the light from above. . . . The way to unity is for us to learn the will of the Lord and then to do it” (Ensign, May 1983, 17).

New differences between my husband and me in taste, personality, and preference come up often, no matter how long we’ve been married. Instead of assuming that these differences are problems and challenges, we’ve learned to look at them as ways to make our life together and relationship interesting. We also try to see differences as opportunities for us to learn about each other and, by overcoming those differences, as opportunities to strengthen our marriage. By constantly remaining committed and constant to one another, with the help of the Holy Ghost to prompt us to draw closer together as we draw closer to the Savior, we have learned that even though we may never have the exact same taste in food choices, we can be unified in important spiritual things while still enjoying some differences.

Over our first summer, Brian, to his own surprise not to mention my own, learned to like wheat bread. I learned how to make and eat breakfast because he felt that was really essential. However, we still buy two different gallons of milk every week, and we’ve decided that that’s okay. Because unity in our marriage is important to us and so are our differences, we can make a good situation out of anything by “having [our] hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another” (Mosiah 18:21).

* Leave a comment! What differences in taste and preference have you worked through in your marriage?