FPC Day 2: Cheeseboy: Love and/or Righteousness

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“Love and righteousness”, now there’s a phrase you don’t hear just tossed around. I doubt any Target manager ever told an employee, “Please go shelve this deodorant… and be sure to do it with love and righteousness.” 

As soon as you throw those two words together in the same sentence, and they become an expectation, the phrase can become very hefty indeed. 

Now, I can honestly say that there are not many things in life that I do in love and righteousness. I’ll often do things with love in mind, such as driving my son to soccer practice or giving my wife a foot massage, but I also qualify those things with self-complaint, wishing I was actually doing something else.

Likewise, I also do things in attempt only to be righteous or obedient, but without any sense of love.  I’ve been known to grudgingly venture to a Priesthood leadership meeting on a lovely Saturday afternoon, when I’d rather be watching football on my couch with thirty two ounces of Pepsi splashing perceptively in my mug.  But I go anyway, out of a sense of priesthood duty, or occasional guilt; my motivation is often unclear or impure. 

At any rate, to do something with both love AND righteousness, now that just hurts my brain to think about.  Granted, most things hurt my brain to think about, but that’s not the point.  The point is to have to do both, at the same time; it seems a lot is expected of us fathers.  

One evening, as a newlywed many years ago, I learned what presiding in love and righteousness truly meant and became painfully aware of my failure at it.  My wife and I were at an extended family party and the conversation there evolved into a discussion of past embarrassments. In a misguided effort to be funny (all my efforts to be funny seem to be misguided), I told a story from my wife’s past that made her red in the face with embarrassment.  Later, I would find that the her red face was not a sign of embarrassment, but rage.

On the car ride home, my wife began to cry and express her disappointment that I would do such a thing to her.  I had not even considered my story hurtful, but I realized it at that moment that I had not acted in love or righteousness.  I had acted in foolishness. Danged foolishness.

Sitting in that car, with a crying wife whom I loved and a sense of dread in my heart, I developed a new appreciation for what it means to preside with love and righteousness.  Lesson learned.

My advice to other fathers is to keep “Love and Righteousness” as an overarching theme of your family life.  Perhaps when you are teaching, helping or disciplining your children, you are not consciously thinking, “I am doing this for you in love and righteousness.” But if you have committed and dedicated yourself to do everything you do as a husband and father in love and righteousness, you will be more likely to be the father you’d like to be.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go fluster my ten year old son in front of a bunch of girls.  I mean, let’s not get too carried away here.