President Kimball, stated back in 1980, “ …only those who believe deeply and actively in the family will be able to preserve their families in the midst of the gathering evil around us.” How profound these remarks are today, nearly 40 years later. President Kimball’s insight into the future, now very much a reality for us in today’s world, sheds a haunting truth… his prophetic words are already coming to pass.
We see it all around us; marriages unraveling, families splitting apart. We see the wake of devastation divorce leaves behind as children suffer and parents are left with limited resources to help their children cope. Divorce often puts both parents into financial strain, and if they had the luxury of having one parent at home while the marriage was intact, that luxury often dissolves soon after divorce. As both parents often must enter the workforce to survive, children are left to their own devices, unattended, unsupervised and just trying to cope with the painful aftermath of intense change. The trends affecting our children after divorce are startling. As described in Amato’s “The State of Our Unions,” children of divorce are more prone to delinquency, violence and crime, more substance abuse, earlier sexual activity, higher teen pregnancy, lower grades as well as greater rates of depression and anxiety.
These statistics alarm me. I watched my five children suffer through my bitter divorce, much like my siblings and I suffered through our parent’s bitter divorce. And even though my adult children suffered through a great deal in the wake of our painful marriage, and they will say divorce was in the best interest of all involved, here I am six years later still taunted by aftermath of it all. I couldn’t fix it. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t fix it. And my children suffered. So now what? What scars are now left upon the hearts of my children? Will they carry the same wounds I have carried my whole life? Will there always be this broken piece inside them they can never recover? How will I ever shelter them from the pains that shadowed me for so long?
What about the culminating effect of all of society’s ills caused by divorce? Amato stated, “Children are the first victims of divorce.” With a society filled with the incalculable injuries of the broken family, how can we possibly heal now that the “victims” of divorce seem to out number the rest?
The answer is written in my heart. I believe in people and their tenacious ability to pick themselves up after the devastation of trauma. I believe in human resilience. I believe that people are inherently capable of rising out of the ashes of their own refiner’s fire and building a stronger, better and wiser world around them. I believe in the power of hope and the faith that precedes it. I believe in the strength of a soul who, in the midst of severe circumstances, can change the course of their lives and forever change the lives of those around them. I love the quote by Carlfred Broderick: “A transitional character is one who, in a single generation, changes the entire course of a lineage. The changes might be for good or ill, but the most noteworthy examples are those individuals who grow up in an abusive, emotionally destructive environment and who somehow find a way to metabolize the poison and refuse to pass it on to their children. They break the mold. They refute the observation that abused children become abusive parents, that the children of alcoholics become alcoholic adults, that “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of the children to the third and fourth generation.” Their contribution to humanity is to filter the destructiveness out of their own lineage so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives.”
No matter the storm that surrounds us, no matter the destruction that is sure to set in at some point in our lives, we have the power to rise above all that befalls us and create a life of purpose, of integrity, and of rebuilding the hearts of men. If we take the power that is ours, the God-given power to heal that lies within all of us, and we TEACH it… by pure example, we have the potential to leave an indelible mark on the many souls who come within the reach of our influence.