We all belong to many communities at the same time, communities of different sizes with different purposes and different amounts of influence in our lives. Some communities touch only one area of your life; others are wound into every facet of our existence. They are often the source of our fundamental values and priorities.

 I have been the most influenced throughout my life by my immediate family and my church, and those two communities themselves are tightly interwoven. I believe the family I have today exists because of the teachings we received from our church. At the same time, I wouldn’t belong to the church I do if it weren’t for the influence of my family.

 I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One of the things the Church is most famous for is its emphasis on families. As I attended church growing up, I learned the song “I Am a Child of God,” which begins “I am a child of God/And He has sent me here,/Has given me an earthly home/With parents kind and dear.”

 This belief in the importance of the family and its eternal place in God’s plan for His children is central to everything we do in our church. As the late Boyd K. Packer, one of the leaders of the Church, put it, “The ultimate purpose of every teaching, every activity in the Church is that parents and their children are happy at home, sealed in an eternal marriage, and linked to their generations.”[1]

But I, like all of you, live in a wider community, and sometimes marriage seems so fragile. Everyone I know has been touched by divorce in some way, whether as a spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling, or a friend. The prevalence of divorce has even caused some people to fear getting married in the first place. According to the authors of The State of our Unions: Marriage in America 2012, “[W]e are also witnessing a striking exodus from marriage, especially among high school but not college educated young people, for whom raising children amid unstable cohabiting relationships and serial partnerships is in danger of becoming the new norm.”[2]  

 Sometimes, divorce may be necessary to end an intolerable situation, and we might be grateful it exists for those instances, but no one gets married hoping to get divorced. We don’t want young people to be so afraid of failing at marriage that they choose not to get married at all. We want the benefits and joys of a happy marriage, for ourselves and for the people we love. Where can we turn to know how to have the marriage we dream of? 

 I believe the best place to look is in the gospel of Jesus Christ. In April 1995, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a document entitled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.”[3] It detailed our understanding of the place of the family in God’s plan and stated our belief in and support for the family as the foundation of a healthy society. It also offered important direction for a happy marriage.

Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.


 When we are struggling to know how to make our families the best they can be and hold them close during hard times, we can turn to this counsel. We can ask ourselves, “Am I doing something to hurt other members of my family, something I need to repent of?” “Am I carrying a grudge that I can let go of and forgive?” “How can I show more love, respect, and compassion for the person in my family I’m worried about or angry at?”

 These principles may seem basic and obvious, but as we consistently apply them in our families, we will be astounded at the happiness we can achieve. We can spread love and hope outward, starting from our own homes and working outward to the wider community and through them, to the whole world.

[1] Packer, Boyd K., “The Father and the Family,” Ensign, May 1994, https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/1994/05/the-father-and-the-family?lang=eng.
[2] Elizabeth Marquardt, David Blankenhorn, Robert I. Lerman, Linda Malone-Colón, and W. Bradford Wilcox, “The
President’s Marriage Agenda for the Forgotten Sixty Percent,” The State of Our Unions, p. xi, (Charlottesville, VA: National Marriage Project and Institute for American Values, 2012).

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