Children are consummately precious
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Children are consummately precious, said President Boyd K. Packer who, during the Saturday morning session of conference declared, "A deep concern for parents and their children is in my mind and heart and soul."
The Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve recalled an incident from many years ago in Cuzco, Peru, when a ragged street orphan inched his way into a sacrament meeting. President Packer held out his arms and the boy ran to him. For a while, the child sat on his lap, and then in a chair next to him. The child darted away immediately following the closing prayer. President Packer said he has never forgotten that child and many times has looked for him in the faces of the people as he has traveled to South America.
President Packer said that when he later told President Spencer W. Kimball about the child, President Kimball replied, "That experience has far greater meaning than you have yet come to know."
President Packer told of having seen in Japan at the end of World War II a boy raggedly dressed and holding a rusty tin can and a spoon, the symbol of the orphan beggar. With some emotion, President Packer told of struggling to open the door of the train he was riding in order to give the child money, but the train pulled away. "I will never forget that hungry little boy standing in the cold holding up his empty tin can," he said.
He spoke of a sick first grade boy in a government Indian school; the boy's mother had sent some Navajo fry bread and pieces of mutton as a Christmas present. Another child he spoke of was a refugee, perched atop a massive bundle carried by her mother. "As they pushed slowly and silently by, she looked into the camera," President Packer said. "That sober little black face and those big black eyes seemed to ask, 'Why?' "
President Packer said children are the past, the present and the future all blended into one. "Every time a child is born, the world is renewed in innocence."
There is nothing in the scriptures, or anywhere else, that gives license to parents or anyone to neglect or abuse or molest their own or anyone else's children, he said.
"There is in the scriptures, there is in what we publish, there is in what we believe, there is in what we teach counsel, commandments, even warnings that we are to protect, to love, to care for, and to 'teach [children] to walk in the ways of truth.' (Mosiah 4:15.) To betray them is utterly unthinkable.
"Among the strongest warnings and the severest penalties in the revelations are those relating to little children. Jesus said, 'But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.' " (Matthew 18:6.)
Children, said President Packer, should not be ignored or neglected. "They absolutely must not be abused or molested. Children must not be abandoned or estranged by divorce. Parents are responsible to provide for their children. The Lord said, 'All children have claim upon their parents for their maintenance until they are of age.' (Doctrine and Covenants 83:4.)
"We are to look after their physical, their spiritual, and after their emotional needs. . . .
"Nothing compares to a father who is responsible and in turn teaches his children responsibility. Nothing compares with a mother who is present with them to comfort them and give them assurance and love and protection and tenderness. They are all of consummate worth."
Too often, continued President Packer, a parent is left alone to raise children. "The Lord has His way of strengthening that parent to meet alone what should be the responsibility of two parents. For either parent to deliberately abandon their children is a very grievous mistake."
President Packer said that over the years he wondered what President Kimball meant when he reminded him of that street orphan in Cuzco and one day said, "You held a nation in your lap."
President Packer said, "Now in my 78th year, I understand what President Kimball was seeing: I know what he meant. That boy in Cuzco and the one in Japan and the other children about the world profoundly influence what I think and how I feel and what I pray for most earnestly. I constantly think of little children and their parents who struggle to raise them in evermore perilous times."
He spoke of worldwide travels, of positions of trust in education, business, government and the Church, of books he has written, and honors, degrees, certificates, plaques and honors that "come with the territory and are undeserved."
"Assessing the value of those things, the one thing I treasure more than any of them — more than all of them put together — the thing of most value to me is how our sons and daughters and their husbands and wives treat their children and how, in turn, our little grandchildren treat their little ones.
"When it comes to understanding our relationship with our Heavenly Father, the things my wife and I have learned as parents and grandparents that are most worth knowing, we have learned from our children."
