Every great work begins with vision. Every beautiful building begins as a blueprint. Every amazing dish with a recipe. In family life, we can do the same. President Nelson said, “Decide what kind of life you want to live forever.” We can determine the portion of life that rests within our power to choose, and decide the kind of family life we want to live.
In educational science, when we design a learning program, we always start with the ideal and move to the real. We imagine the most ideal learning situation for a given outcome—no budget, location or time constraints. There is no technology too cumbersome or far fetched. These realities exist, but starting with the ideal allows for ideas that would have been stifled under a more limited vision.
In The Magic City by Edith Nesbit, Phillip lives with his aunt. They build an island for just the two of them. Everything they could possibly want is there. A castle for Phillip. A modest castle, labeled as a cottage, for his sister. A pond you can skate on, even in the summer, and fruit that flowers and fruits at the same time.
Having the foundation of the ideal allows us to see the world without unnecessary limits. It is a safe and risk-free way to examine desires. It allows the exploration of a multitude of possibilities beyond the scope of probability. It allows teaches us to dream.
Our family vision began, as any number of experts have recommended, with a twenty-year dream. We imagined a Christmas party at our stunning home overlooking the Salt Lake Valley, where our children are visiting to celebrate the day. Each child thought over who they imagined they would be at that time, what their lives would look like, what our family relationships would look like. As Amy says in the Winona Rider film of Little Women, “We’ll all grow up one day, Meg. We might as well know what we want.”
The twenty-year party is a lovely idea, and we still reference it, but somehow the idea has grown to incorporate a whole community of where and who and what our future will include. With it came a lifestyle. We imagined happy interactions between cousins and the adults in their lives.
Though this was not necessarily the original intended purpose, the idea has grown to provide a vision for our individual desired roles in life. Like Teyva’s family in Anatevka, Fiddler on the Roof, they know who they are and what God expect them to be. While still in childhood, our children have envisioned the loving family relationships they desire to have as adults.
That was fifteen years ago. With just five years to go, we’re looking closely at how this is playing out. My daughter recently attended a speech by Elder Patrick Kearon. She shared something I love. Elder Kearon shared, quoting Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.”
Life is a careful balance between looking to and planning for the future and at the same time, embracing the reality of real life’s chaos and God’s often unseen vision for us. We often have to acknowledge that our twenty-year dream may need modification. It may even exist only in relationships. But if we could maintain even a portion of the kind of family love we imagine we will have, that is something powerful!
The story of The Magic City continues as the main character actually goes to this magic island with his sister, Helen, and everything is as they imagined it! When Helen marries, and Phillip is faced with sharing his sister, he ends up giving away the imaginary island. To become the hero he needs to become, he chooses to give the dream island away, realizing that although he will now have to share his sister with her new husband and stepsister, it does not mean that his sister loves him any less.
We dream, we pray, we attempt to embrace that sense of suspense and incompleteness. Continuing to dream and work for a vision that constantly shifts takes faith. Accepting the unpredictable requires a massive amount of trust! As valuable as the ideal is, God’s plan for us is even greater, his vision more far reaching. Aligning our vision with God’s is the goal. He always has a great vision for us than we have for ourselves, but he does want us to keep dreaming. He just hopes that we can come to see our dreams become as great as his dreams are for us.
Social Media
Search