Enduring marriage requires love, effort
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Thankfulness for the progress of the Church throughout the world - and sorrow for priesthood holders who failed to honor their priesthood - were expressed by President Gordon B. Hinckley during the priesthood session Saturday evening.
President Hinckley, first counselor in the First Presidency, remarked that he was sustained as a member of the Council of the Twelve 30 years ago. Since that time, Church membership has grown from 1.8 million to 8 million.He commented that he also experienced sorrow from seeing the unhappiness of wives in the Church whose husbands did not honor their priesthood. He quoted from a letter from a woman whose husband had divorced her:
"Now I am a single parent," she wrote. "What an enormous load of heartache, pain, and loneliness are behind that statement. . . . I join the ranks of tired women whose husbands leave them. I have no money, no job. I have children to care for, bills to pay, and not much hope."
President Hinckley commented, "I cannot understand how a man who holds the holy priesthood and who has entered into sacred and binding covenants before the Lord could justify abandoning his responsibilities before the Lord for his wife of 18 years and the five children who exist because of him, and of whose flesh and blood and inheritance they have partaken."
He decried violent and cruel tempers of men "that explode on the slightest provocation."
President Hinckley spoke against immorality. Husbands break sacred covenants when they covet another's wife and commit adultery, he said. Such "are ensnared by their own foolishness and their own weakness."
"You know as I know that there is no lasting peace in the heart, no tranquility in the home without the companionship of a good woman. Our wives are not our inferiors."
A happy and enduring marriage requires effort, and the "true essence of love, which is an anxious concern for the well-being and happiness of one's companion," he said.
