In my church the women’s organization is called the Relief Society. There are three main purposes of the Relief Society: 1. Increasing faith and personal righteous, 2. Strengthening families and homes and 3. Serve the Lord and His children. I want to talk about the third purpose and an experience I had lately. We have a program called Visiting Teaching. Every sister in the Relief Society, who wants to, is assigned other sisters in the ward (name of our local congregations) to look out for. Once a month we are asked to visit our sisters and take them a spiritual message, we also ask if there are any needs and make sure our sisters know they are loved and that if they need anything they can call us. It is an organised way of looking out for each other. Visiting Teachers are the ones who take meals for new babies or sickness, they are a listening ear, help with the lonely and pray for and with our sisters. It is a powerful program and I have seen many wonderful things come to pass because of visiting teaching.
This month our lesson was “Guardians of the Hearth”. I loved this lesson, I have a strong testimony of the power of a good woman in her own home, and I know the importance of a righteous woman in her own home. It was easy to see how this lesson applied to me, I am a mother of young children, and I take the job of building a shelter from the world in my own home seriously. However, the sister I was gong to visit is an older lady, widowed, with grown children and grandchildren. I knew this applied to her, but was having a hard time expressing my feeling on how this subject applied to her. As I pondered how this truth applied to her the thought came to me “we all have different hearths at different times in out lives”. It occurred to me that a woman doesn’t have to have children at home to exercise this part of her divine nature: to love and nurture. In fact a little girl is born with this drive and desire to love and nurture, I have many times seen a small girl pick up a baby doll and love it, without any coaxing. All woman, young and old have their hearths to guard, depending on the season of their life. Everyone, our young girls, our youth, the young single adult, the married with and without children, our single sisters and our grandmothers, all have important hearths to guard.
It is part of our Divine Nature
