Sabbath Devotional :: Parental Love

I have always loved these verses in Matthew 7:

9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?

10 Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?

11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

As I move through the world, I am constantly reminded of the gifts of loving Heavenly parents and of their care and concern for me. Often I feel God’s love through the beauty and solace of nature, in my wonder at the depth and breadth of the natural world and the many small miracles within it. Other times, the people around me and the ways they show care are needed reminders.

A month or so ago during my spring break, I spent a few days at my parents’ house. They live a little under an hour away and often I go to see them, but they hadn’t seen my apartment recently as I have been getting more settled in, so they came over to see it with me. I had asked for my dad’s help with hanging a couple of things that required drywall anchors (aka above my pay grade). My dad had asked me to bring the items I was going to hang so we could make sure he had the right materials once we got back to my apartment. I also remembered that I had been meaning to borrow some WD40 to apply to my squeaky closet door.

When my parents got to my apartment, my dad and I got right to work getting things hung. He also worked on my closet doors — they had been really loud and squeaky ever since I moved in in August and I had gotten used to it. But my dad spent a half hour carefully treating each hinge and identifying where the worst sounds were coming from — the metal track at the top where the closet door was affixed to slide through was a major source of friction, so he carefully applied more WD40 up there, and each time would test and retest the doors to see how they were improving.

After fixing my closet doors, my dad carefully went through the rest of my apartment and tested every doorknob and hinge and treated the rest of these too, as some were not operating smoothly and it had probably been years since anyone re-conditioned them.

I felt surprisingly emotional about this gesture of my dad’s — he took such great care with helping me, and he also went out of his way to ensure that everything else that could be fixed with this simple solution was. Obviously these are easy fixes I could have done myself months earlier, but with my intense grad program, it was always the things I just never got around to. I am so grateful for my parents and this latest experience reminded me how much they care about me, and by extension, was a reminder of how loved I am by my Heavenly parents.

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Elizabeth VanDerwerken is peaceful root director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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