Laura and I talked tonight about something that I have thought about many times over the last few years. I have thought about how far we can transmit the things that we have learned and wondered what we can do to increase the range of our transmission.
We talked about how much we have learned from the mistakes of our parents. We make decisions based on those things we learned but we would like to make sure that those choices are not transparent to our children. We want them not only to learn the things we teach but learn why we made the choices we did regarding what to teach. It’s not that we expect that we have or will parent perfectly at any time. We fully hope and expect that our children will see and hopefully learn from our mistakes, but we also want the lessons we have learned not to be lost within one generation due to having our children learn the lessons without the reasons so that they can mimic those correct actions but be entirely unable to explain why they were doing what they were doing beyond “that’s how my parents did things.”
We believe that doing that would make it so that future generations, who have no understanding of the why will find it easy to discard the truths when they are casting around for solutions to the problems that they recognize from their parents.
In order to minimize that, Laura and I have decided to record our insights as we have them and tag them with a special tag so that they can be easily identified. The tag we have chosen (being used here for the first time) is “remember the captivity of your fathers.” It would be best if our posterity who ever read these things would equate this with Alma chapter five where Alma asks the people of the church in Zerahemla if they have sufficiently “retained in remembrance the captivity of {their} fathers” because by so remembering they would stay true to the truths that their fathers learned which set them free from the bondage they had been in. Likewise we hope that they will be able to remember the lessons that we have learned from the bondage of our parents (and perhaps at times from our own bondage) that the truths which set us free over the course of our lives will be treasured and passed on so that they need not suffer from the bondage of their ancestors.
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