Proclamation Series: Memorizing the Proclamation

The Family: A Proclamation to the World is an inspired document, and is scripture.  It was written by holy prophets for our day and time.  As the title says...it is a proclamation about families for the whole world. This is a powerful and timeless.

About 5 years after it was given, my parents called all of their children and challenged us to memorize the Proclamation. They had just finished memorizing it themselves after being challenged by their Stake President in Stake Conference.  To the inspiration of hundreds, a thirteen-year old girl stood and quoted it in front of their whole stake.

There is something to memorizing ....  when we memorize--we internalize.

So I accepted my parents challenge and set off to memorize this inspired, but huge document.  I already knew it was true and powerful, but I didn't know it, like I came to know it through this memorizing journey.

And it was a journey...of the proclamation becoming apart of me. 

One paragraph at a time....I would would work on....

I carried a copy around where ever I was in the house.  If I was washing dishes, it sat in my window sill and I would memorize away while I washed and cleaned the kitchen. 

When I was vacuuming, I was chanting the verses out loud trying to instill them into my brain.

While I was running errands around town, I was going through the Proclamation...

While I was rocking babies to sleep, I had it in my hand reading and memorizing important phrases and and family principles...instilling them into me.

Within a few days, maybe it was a week, I had memorized The Family: a Proclamation to the World. 

It was now internalized! 

To read and print off The Family: A Proclamation to the World  {Click Here}

POWER in the Word

I want to add my witness that scriptures have power to change lives.

"Prophets and apostles have assured us that as we face the trials of mortality, we can find strength, comfort, and peace in the gospel of Jesus Christ. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First Presidency, said, “I testify as an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ … that the gospel is true, and that it offers the answers to all personal and collective challenges the children of God have on this earth today.”¹

Our individual circumstances may vary, but we can each turn to a divine source of power—the scriptures. ” (2 Nephi 31:20)."  (Ensign August 2012, Finding Power in the Scriptures)

 

Many years ago, I  was a young mother with 4 children under 4.  Two were toddlers, and two were newborn twins.  There is really only one word to describe my life back then...overwhelming! After all of my help left, (aka, my mom) getting through each day was a hard challenge. When I wasn't feeding or changing a newborn baby, I was taking care of my oldest two daughters who were 3 and 2. 

Can you imagine how busy and crazy that was!  I look back now, with fond memories, yet wonder how I did it? The answer is, I didn't do it alone.  None of us do and the scriptures had everything to do with how I successfully managed motherhood then and now.

 Without  a regular pattern of prayer and scripture study  in my life, I wouldn't have the power, strength, and guidance to magnify the most important calling in my life:  Motherhood.

 I learned very quickly, that reading my scriptures and saying personal prayers wasn't something I could opt out of as a mother.  I needed  the power that comes from daily prayer and scripture study.  

The very day I opened up my scriptures, the Lord immediately blessed me .  {See Mosiah 2: 24}

How have the scriptures changed your life?

Must Read Talks on the power of scriptures:

The Power of Scripture- Elder Richard G. Scott, November 2011 Ensign

Finding Power in the Scriptures- August 2012 Ensign, pg 54

Jeffrey R. Holland: Lessons From Liberty Jail

Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail by Liz Lemon Swindle

"One of the most trying times in the history of the Church, both in terms of its impact on the Church generally and in the life of the Prophet Joseph Smith personally, occurred during the winter of 1838–39. The Prophet, who bore the brunt of the persecution in that period, had been imprisoned in the ironically named Liberty Jail. Until his martyrdom five and a half years later, there was no more burdensome time in Joseph’s life than this cruel, illegal, and unjustified incarceration."

"In the Prophet Joseph’s letters, he spoke of the jail being a “hell, surrounded with demons … where we are compelled to hear nothing but blasphemous oaths, and witness a scene of blasphemy, and drunkenness and hypocrisy, and debaucheries of every description.”² “We have … not blankets sufficient to keep us warm; and when we have a fire, we are obliged to have almost a constant smoke,” he said.³ “Our souls have been bowed down”⁴ and “my nerve trembles from long confinement,” Joseph wrote.⁵ “Pen, or tongue, or angels,” could not adequately describe “the malice of hell” that he suffered there.⁶ All of this occurred during what, by some accounts, was considered the coldest winter on record in the state of Missouri."

Ironically, Elder Holland  refers to the Liberty Jail as a temple

"Most of us, most of the time, speak of the facility at Liberty as a “jail” or a “prison”—and certainly it was that. But Elder Brigham H. Roberts (1857–1933) of the First Council of the Seventy, in recording the history of the Church, spoke of the facility as a temple, or, more accurately, a “prison-temple.”

"The speech and behavior of the guards and criminals who came there were anything but temple-like. In fact, the restricting brutality and injustice of this experience at Liberty would make it seem the very antithesis of the liberating, merciful spirit of our temples and the ordinances performed in them."

How then could something so horrible as the Liberty Jail experience be compared to a temple? 

I love this

' ... that you can have sacred, revelatory, profoundly instructive experiences with the Lord in any situation you are in. Indeed, you can have sacred, revelatory, profoundly instructive experiences with the Lord in the most miserable experiences of your life—in the worst settings, while enduring the most painful injustices, when facing the most insurmountable odds and opposition you have ever faced."

"In one way or another, great or small, dramatic or incidental, every one of us is going to spend a little time in Liberty Jail—spiritually speaking. We will face things we do not want to face for reasons that may not be our fault. Indeed, we may face difficult circumstances for reasons that were absolutely right and proper, reasons that came because we were trying to keep the commandments of the Lord. We may face persecution, we may endure heartache and separation from loved ones, we may be hungry and cold and forlorn. Yes, before our lives are over we may all be given a little taste of what the prophets faced often in their lives."

Read More {Lessons from Liberty Jail}