No Eternal Family without Ordinances and Endurance?

I would agree with you. In my mind once my God had open arms to hug me he didn’t have a way to hold a clipboard and a big red pen to checkoff items.

I also feel that the “eternal sealing” can make people feel good, but I think many people feel that God will allow them to be with their loved ones after this life if they live good lives. What loving God wouldn’t want that?

I agree with LH, I can’t imagine a loving God keeping families apart because they don’t want a temple sealing or they have become unworthy to go in the temple. I think like LH said, as long as we live good lives and try our best, God knows our hearts. The plan of ‘eternal families’ purpose is to create a comfort that we’ll all be together in the eternities. However, this isn’t the case if we aren’t all perfectly righteous? That doesn’t create much comfort since no one has control over their family members’ righteousness. Also, here’s a scenario, let’s say a family who isn’t lds were all the same amount of righteous and all entered the terrestrial kingdom. Doesn’t that mean they’ll still be together forever? They’d all be on the same heavenly level so technically there wouldn’t be a need for a sealing if everyone in the family is the same level of righteousness. Idk why God would keep a family who’s on the same level away from each other. That’d be messed up. Idk how heaven works, but I’m using the lds’s version of it to theorize a bit. I know that I personally feel like God completely understands why I’m struggling with the church right now. I think He knows I’m trying my best and I don’t think a loving God would keep me from my family if I wasn’t temple worthy when I died. Just going off of the idea of God as a parental figure, I wouldn’t keep my son from seeing his kids in the eternities if he didn’t do a specific temple ordinance. Or let’s say he went through a similar thing to what I did, getting a prayer answer wrong and losing my trust in prayer answers. I would completely understand why he lost trust in things. I can’t imagine myself being like ‘sorry, you were supposed to blindly believe even if things were incorrect so now you can’t be with your family.’ Doesn’t work for me

ETA: I would also be understanding if my son had some of the reasons you all have for struggling with the church. Most people I’ve talked to have reasonable reasons for struggling with the church and I think God understands

And when we are just past the teens, it sure seemed like a really great thing to do.

And I have to say when the complexities like Heber’s case are brought up and members often say, “Oh God will sort it all out in the end” I vacillate between wanting to say

– Exactly! God will let families be together even if they were not sealed here.

and

– Saying that just weakens the doctrine of sealing to be rather insignificant. “You MUST be sealed, unless it is messy then you don’t HAVE to be sealed”

The latter always reminds me of the saying, “Just shoot ’em all and let God sort ’em out.” Which is often said in jest, but probably reflects one of the worst aspects of religion – the ability to kill others in the name of MY faith/God. I think I heard about an athiest saying, “God does not kill people, people that think God is telling them to kill people are the ones that kill people.”

I have a question — do you believe the only way to have eternal family is through ordinances and “enduring to the end”?

No. I think my nuclear family is just as together on the other side as my neighbor’s. They don’t need another sealing; their love is it. It endured.

I assume that whatever constitutes “me” at that point will be further down the road of perfect love. And as an example, my enormous love and respect for my mother will not be diminished if I learn to Iove her abusive, alcoholic father. To me, that’s sealing – creating a place holder or space in our hearts for future love.

It seems to me that the forever family/sealing idea – which I assume was originally mostly to comfort surviving family members – has gotten horribly knotted up on itself, and the church will need to reframe it pretty soon.

I don’t think the ordinances themselves are anything more than symbolic and mostly for our benefit. I was baptized to symbolically demonstrate that I wish to follow Christ. I was sealed in the temple to symbolically represent that I hoped to be with my wife and (future) children forever. I honestly think we’re actually OK without them. I can follow Christ without being baptized (and over and over again he asked us people to believe in or follow him). I know many family members and friends who believe their marriages and relationships will carry on after this life and none of them are LDS. Have you ever heard a Christian say they thought anything other than they would be met by their loved ones when they die? How many obituaries (and I suppose I have to be specific to outside the Corridor here) have you read that say something like “Fred went to join his loving wife Ethel in Jesus’s arms?” Part of my faith crisis dealt with the loving Heavenly Father thing. I hope God is loving enough to allow us to be with each other should we desire for eternity. What else is he going to do with us, put us on little separate islands?

Endurance is also something I have contemplated a bit. I get it, it’s part of basic theology (see Ray’s signature line). But what does “endure” really mean? I have endured some pretty awful Sunday School lessons – to the end (I have also left some). So what about those who don’t endure to the end? Isn’t that what mercy, grace, and the atonement are for? Or are we so caught up in using fear as a weapon that we forget that?

And while I’m at it, I’m not sure everybody believes the stuff about ordinances and enduring anyway – possibly even some top leaders. However, at this point there’s no way to save face and back of those things. We can’t have taught how necessary temple sealing is and we can’t have allowed people to spend thousands of hours researching and in the temple doing proxy work for others only to turn around and say, “Well, that stuff wasn’t all really necessary, you see, there’s a spiritual component to all of this.”

Feeling the power of the Dark Side?

I try not to complicate the teaching & doctrines of the church. We really don’t know for certain what lies in eternity. There are many possibilities.

I think my nuclear family is just as together on the other side as my neighbor’s. They don’t need another sealing; their love is it. It endured.

I believe more and more religious people outside the church are starting to view eternal families as the default. There’s no ordinance hurdle to having an eternal family (other than perhaps the civil marriage) and that’s just the way it is….. “What’s going to keep us apart?”

“Oh God will sort it all out in the end”

I agree with all these points…it seems logical. And I think most members of other faiths I talk to also think this way because it is logical. Where we claim to have this all important teaching and temple…others are kinda shrugging their shoulders about it…they mostly believe it too…just don’t really have a specific teaching or ordinance for it because it is assumed God is great enough to make the eternities wonderful beyond our imaginations.

Saying that just weakens the doctrine of sealing to be rather insignificant.

…and I think that is where the conversation can go. Because if it weakens it, if God works it all out, if it will all be amazing with our without temple sealings…what is the point? That can weaken the church’s claims to some people.

But…as I said…I think there is value to the temple ordinances.

I don’t think the ordinances themselves are anything more than symbolic and mostly for our benefit.

This is where I land to also. With faith, they become important to us. With faith, you can leave all the other families and their situations up to God to work out, and not have to make sense of it all. I can just go t the temple, see the symbolic meaning of the eternal family as we understand families now, and project our hopes and promises to good things about my spouse and all my kids all wanting to be together forever, enough to sacrifice for that idea. And there can be great power in it.

God will sort it all out.

I think it just can be problematic for some people if it is all taken too literally, which requires a lot of explaining. And it is simpler to just have faith in the symbolism, and draw from that without giving up on it as if nothing matters at all.

Just for the sake of clarification, I understand that individuals that are not resurrected with celestial bodies will not have reproductive organs. This is gospel teaching under the Mcconkie school of thought. It is much less about eternal families as it is about eternal increase.

The catalyst for my FC was the stillbirth of my daughter. It was difficult to learn that she did not officially exist as a member of our family (on church records aka the book of life). No ordinances are performed for stillborn children.

Is She part of our eternal family or Not? DW and I get to decide. It was frightening at first to be in a position were church records and temple ordinances meant nothing (in regards to what we believed about our daughter and our connection to her).

Spoiler alert: We decided that our deceased daughter is part of our family. I know of other families that have come to different conclusions and I respect their thoughts and feelings on their individual circumstances.

For me lately I have begun to think of the temple sealing like training wheels. They can be super helpful to provide for stability and balance as you try to find your footing. However, there also comes a point where they can be unnecessary and even a hindrance to a more mature and fully developed familial love.