This story about Molly should be titled “How to perfectly NOT do Home Teaching.”
First presidency letter from 2001 acknowledges that sometimes a monthly visit in the home of each family is not possible. Of course that isn’t the case in our ward.
Lift your vision of home teaching to something better than a Law of Moses, end of the month, visit to deliver a accepted message from a church magazine that the family has already read.
The story of John is “Home Teaching in practice”
Brethren, may we briefly examine the priesthood duty that has been described as “the Church’s first source of help” to its individuals and families. Entire forests have been sacrificed providing the paper to organize it and then reorganize it. A thousand pep talks have been given trying to encourage it. Certainly no Freudian travel agency anywhere could possibly arrange the number of guilt trips this subject has provoked. Yet still we struggle to achieve anywhere near an acceptable standard of performance regarding the Lord’s commandment “to watch over the church always” through priesthood home teaching.
Brethren, in the best of all worlds and in those circumstances where it can be done, a monthly visit in each home is still the ideal the Church would strive for.
Maybe we should change our focus from trying to go together once a month to share a message and instead make a commitment to make contact weekly as individuals with each family and to communicate as a companionship at least monthly to share our observations regarding their current situation – whatever it might be. By doing so we might create the kind of relationship with our families that would be conducive to real support.
Built into that schedule would be the prioritization of our available time and frequency of contacts to those who need us the most—investigators the missionaries are teaching, newly baptized converts, those who are ill, the lonely, the less active, single-parent families with children still at home, and so forth.
The fact that none of these descriptions applies to any of my home teaching families makes it harder to feel able to bless them and thus less motivated to make even a pharisaic visit.
Certainly we would watch for our families at church and, as the scripture says, would “speak one with another concerning the welfare of their souls.”6 In addition, we would make phone calls, send emails and text messages, even tap out a greeting through one of the many forms of social media available to us. To help address special needs, we might send a scriptural quote or a line from a general conference talk or a Mormon Message.
How can I become less than fully consumed with the day to day challenges of my own home and begin to look outward for ways to bless others? I feel trapped by the fact that my home is dysfunctional and my family unwilling/unable to meet our own most basic needs for peace and order.
He started by saying, “Troy, Austen wants you back on your feet—including on the basketball court—so I will be here every morning at 5:15 a.m. Be ready because I don’t want to have to come in to get you up—and I know Deedra doesn’t want me to do that either.”
“I didn’t want to go,” Troy told me later, “because I had always taken Austen with me on those mornings and I knew the memories would be too painful.
It is clear here that John and Troy already had a relationship surrounding morning basketball if nothing else before this tragedy.
My brethren of the holy priesthood, when we speak of home teaching or watchcare or personal priesthood ministry—call it what you will—this is what we are talking about. We are asking you as home teachers to be God’s emissaries to His children, to love and care and pray for the people you are assigned, as we love and care and pray for you.
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