This lesson by Spencer W. Kimball makes me all the more glad the church coordinates lessons from auxiliary to auxiliary. After all, it’s always nicer to have a lesson on marriage when both the husband and wife can hear it!
The lesson begins with a memoir from a former employee of President Kimball’s, who shared how she saw him write a letter to his wife every day while she was off staying with a sick child in the hospital. Sometimes, when he was very busy at work, he’d dictate a letter and this employee would write it down. She said she felt “it was almost a sacred honor.”
What can we do to attain a marriage as full of joy and happiness as the Kimball’s had?
First we learn that marriage is essential to Heavenly Father’s plan. We are warned that conspiring forces today would pull us away from our families and teach us that marriage is not essential. However, when we marry in temples by those who have been given the proper authority, it is a joy and a blessing to our lives.
We then go on to learn that we must prepare for marriage. “In selecting a companion for life and for eternity, certainly the most careful planning and thinking and praying and fasting should be done to ensure that of all the decisions, this one must not be wrong.” It’s not enough to be attracted to someone—we need to choose carefully.
He tells us that “soul mates” are fiction. While we certainly should strive to find a mate that is compatible, we aren’t searching for the “one” we were assigned to before. He says that any good man and any good woman can have a happy marriage if they are willing to pay the price.
The four steps to a happy marriage are:
1. Having a proper approach to marriage.
2. Great unselfishness and forgetting yourself.
3. Continued courting and expressions of love.
4. Complete living of the commandments.
Life can certainly intrude and keep us from spending time with each other, remembering to share loving moments, and distract us from concentrating on those things that are most important. But as we work together with our spouses to realize how very important marriage is, that we should love our spouses with all our hearts, that we should show our love for each other daily, and we remember to bring Christ into our relationship, we can have happy, successful marriages.
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