How grateful I am for the doctrine of eternal marriage and families, as symbolized by this picture of the Provo City Center Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“our” temple). When we get married, we know so little about the ups and downs and everydays that are part of what we hope will be a joyous, forever union of two best friends and lovers. Even after forty years of marriage, I am still working on being good at it, and marveling at the opportunities, successes, failures, and blessings that it brings us as we try to work out our relationship to each other and to the Lord. And it all plays out against the epic background and intimate spaces of our Heavenly Father’s glorious plan. Here is a poem about being married, I hope forever.
Companion for the Journey
I choose you as I’ve chosen you before—
a choice that echoes down time’s mirrored line,
unbreaking, first and last, like our clasped hands,
as you led me through gossamer in white
to kneel with you outside time, inside love.
For years we have created our time-world,
and peopled it and nurtured it as best
we could; we have learned life
and death and opposition in all things.
And we have learned each other, more or less,
while you remain a mystery to me—
a depth that my own depth might never reach;
a power that is other than my own.
You are the men with sun-caught swords upraised,
the men who huddled fearful in the trench,
who trod the silent trail in dappled light,
who cracked the stones in hope and sowed the seeds,
who touched, desired, slept, prayed, wept, worked, blessed,
who stood tall, silent, through the watchful night,
who saw the stars reflected in the sea.
Father, brother, husband, son, and friend—
you hold the earth and skies within your hands.
Behind your eyes the molten worlds are shaped;
their spring is breathed from chaos-fiery night.
And while we meet mortality’s dark blows,
still we can glimpse the light that beacons home.
I choose you yet again, as when I reached
to clasp your hand and thus begin the bond
that seals our timeless, time encircling love.
Lisa Bolin Hawkins
BYU Studies 33:2:311 (1993)
Sisterly Kindness 