17 Jan
Our Heavenly Family
To teach the youth of the Church about their spirits we often use a simple analogy involving a glove and a hand. The hand is the spirit, the glove is the body, and they fit together as one, though they are separate. God is the Father of all our spirits (Hebrews 12:9). Each man and woman who has ever lived is literally a son or daughter of God (Job 38:4-7). “Man, as a spirit, was begotten and born of heavenly parents, and reared to maturity in the eternal mansions of the Father, prior to coming upon the earth in a temporal [physical] body” (Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph F. Smith [1998], 335).
In the Church we call each other “Brother lastname” and “Sister lastname”. As a child I really enjoyed being called Sister Andersen instead of Jenna because it made me feel grown up. 
One reason I believe we call each other Brother and Sister is to remind ourselves that we are spirit brothers and sisters, and should treat each other with the kind of love and respect we would show our mortal family members. Being the spirit children of God means that we have the potential to develop His divine qualities. The young women of the Church stand each week and recite a theme that emphasizes several qualities, one of them being divine nature. From the time they are 12 years old through the age of 18, they are repeatedly taught and reminded what enormous potential they have because of their Heavenly lineage. We all make mistakes, but through the Atonement of Jesus Christ we can repent and become like our Heavenly Father and receive a fullness of His joy. We have a wonderful purpose!
In 1995 the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued The Family Proclamation, which states:
All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.
I was created as a female spirit, gender is eternal. We do not what we did during our time with God before we were born on the earth (known as the pre-mortal life), but we do know that we possessed different talents and abilities and we were called to do different things on earth .Maybe Mozart spent time playing the piano, Marie Curie learning physics, and C.S. Lewis learning how to combine writing and Christianity. God chose to send us down to earth at a specific time with a specific purpose in mind. We can use our talents and skills to achieve that purpose.
Why would we leave such a wonderful environment? Our Heavenly Father knew we could not progress beyond a certain point unless we left Him for a time. He wanted us to develop the godlike qualities that He has. We, as mortal beings, work hard to raise our children in a safe and fulfilling environment at home, but after a certain point we know they need the time and opportunity to learn and choose for themselves. Our spirits needed to be clothed with corporal bodies. We would eventually die, and our spirits would be separated from our bodies once more. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ we would be resurrected and our mortal bodies would be replaced with immortal ones like that of our Heavenly Father. The time on earth would be a probationary period where we would have the option to choose right or wrong, a principle known as free agency.
God called all of his spirit children together (what an enormous meeting that must have been!) to present His plan for our progression, sometimes called The Plan of Happiness. We learned that if after gaining our mortal bodies, we followed His plan, we would become like Him. We would be resurrected; we would have all power in heaven and on earth; we would become heavenly parents and have spirit children just as He does (see D&C 132:19–20).
Why don’t we remember this Grand Council?
A veil would cover our memories, and we would forget our heavenly home. This would be necessary so we could exercise our agency to choose good or evil without being influenced by the memory of living with our Heavenly Father. Thus we could obey Him because of our faith in Him, not because of our knowledge or memory of Him. He would help us recognize the truth when we heard it again on earth (see John 18:37).
We would all have to experience trials in our lives. These could come in the form of sickness, disappointment, sorrow, pain, and death. If we allowed them, these trials would purify us rather than defeat us. They would teach us to have endurance, patience, and charity (see Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball [2006], 15–16). Mortal life would be hard, and because of our weakness, all except little children would sin. Our merciful Father knew this and so he provided a Savior who would provide a way for us to overcome sin and receive the glorious rewards our Father in heaven is waiting to provide for us.
Also:
I'm a farm-raised almost-crunchy stroller-pushing picture-taking lifestyle-blog-writing gastronomy-obsessed divine-seeking thrift-store-combing cheese-inhaling pavement-pounding laughter-sprinkling lover of individuality and taking chances.
well done. i still sometimes look at this eternal plan that our heavenly father came up with in awe. and i love that primary song for teaching it so sweetly.
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1Who does the LDS church identify as their Heavenly Mother? You allude to one by saying you are “begotten and born of heavenly parents.”
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Katy Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 9:40 am
(I’m not sure how ‘official’ this answer is-it’s what I always heard growing up, but at this exact moment @ 7:30 a.m. I haven’t looked up specific reference or anything that points specefically to doctrine…)
We definately believe we have a Heavenly Mother, but we believe Heavenly Father intentionally doesn’t allude to her ‘name’ or anything specific to prevent her name/being from being spoken & taken in vain the way it has been done to God and Jesus Christ. I’m sure there are other reasons (and those we don’t know of or understand yet), but that’s one reason not much is known of her.
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Sophia Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Another reason I’ve been told she isn’t spoken of is because Heavenly Father may have more than one wife, so there are many Heavenly Mother(s). Before Heavenly Father was Heavenly Father he was a man, and he was married to possibly to more than one woman. Every few months on this feminist Mormon site I’ve read for years now there is a post or a question from a concerned woman about “celestial polygamy”. A man can be sealed for all eternity to more than one woman, but a woman can only be sealed to one man. There are many instances where a man was married, got a divorce or was widowed, remarried, and got re-sealed. Because the sealing bond is forever, he is now sealed “for time and all eternity” to two women, and as I’ve been told “we don’t know how it works out in heaven, but it just does”. I’m content with that answer, and personally don’t have any issues with temporal *or* celestial polygamy, but I can see how as a Mormon woman with a few-times-sealed husband I’d be thinking “hmmm…. how is this going to work exactly??”
I find the celestial marriage/Heavenly Parents/ Heavenly Mother doctrines to be some of the most fascinating in any religion I have ever studied. I hope that wasn’t too tangential, but honestly that was another common reason given to me when I asked about Heavenly Mother.
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Kristin Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
That’s an interesting explanation Sophia. I guess it gives way to another question: If God was once man, who created God? How powerful is God if he had to be created?
Was there ever a beginning, an all-powerful, omniscient, omnipresent being? Or are we simply the beginning-less result of spirit becoming man, becoming god, begetting spirit, becoming man, becoming god, etc.
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Sophia Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
For that question, I can’t even begin to have an explanation, haha
But it is certainly one of those enduring questions in lots of religions- if God created us, where did God come from? If God just existed, how did something come from nothing? Sometimes I can make myself crazy trying to wrap my head around the freaky fact that we are even here at all, floating around on a ball in the middle of this insane, mysterious galaxy, just one of uncountable more galaxies… it goes on and on in my head 
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Jenna Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
I’m with Sophia, I’ve never, ever been able to wrap my head around the idea that God had a Father and He a Father before Him and so on and so forth. I think our human minds needs to have a beginning and an end to things.
This article delves into the issue pretty deeply, basically pointing out there there are a lot of things we just don’t know. http://en.fairmormon.org/Nature_of_God/Infinite_regress_of_Gods
I, in part, think we just don’t know because God realizes our brains simply cannot grasp the concept. We have enough doctrine and such to keep us busy for a long time before adding thoughts of infinite regression to the mix.
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Jenna Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Sophia,
Re: A polygamous Father in Heaven. I definitely had to do some digging for this one. Luckily the FAIR website is one of the best resources ever for these kinds of questions.
FAIR asserts that the only time this idea was brought up that we know of was by Orson Pratt, published in a newspaper called The Seer. The Seer was published in 1853 and 1854 and was publicly disowned and rejected by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve in 1865. (See the documentation below.) Despite any truths that it may contain, it cannot be relied upon as an accurate reflection of LDS doctrine.
To me, it sounds like the idea of Heavenly Parents that you’ve been told is something that would be jumped on by critics of the Church, or possibly by members who heard the idea somewhere and latched onto it but had no idea how to go about verifying it.
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Jenna Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Here is the FAIR article on The Seer: http://en.fairmormon.org/The_Seer
and on Heavenly Father as a polygamist: http://en.fairmormon.org/Was_Jesus_Christ_married/Was_Jesus_a_polygamist#Orson_Pratt:_The_Seer
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Jenna Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 8:02 pm
Kristin,
I think this article explains the LDS view of Heavenly Mother very well: http://en.fairmormon.org/Heavenly_Mother
Katy’s reasoning, that we don’t speak of her much or know much about Her is to protect Her from being mocked and criticized as God and Jesus Christ so frequently are. I think it’s quite beautiful actually, to think that Heavenly Father respects and loves Her so completely that He wants to protect Her as much as He can.
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Sophia Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
Jenna- Thanks for the link- I really like FAIR. I do still have a question though… if the idea of a polygamous Father in Heaven can’t be, why are men allowed to be sealed to more than one woman? Theoretically, if man is as God once was, and there are instances of men being sealed to more than one woman, and people progress in sealed relationships towards Godhood… it would seem that the eternal bonds of sealing would either have to be broken after the fact, or men sealed to more than one woman could not ascend to Godhood (which also doesn’t seem fair, because at one point polygamy was accepted), or women would have to decide after death to be voluntarily unsealed, but then *that* wouldn’t work, because how would *they* progress? Does that make sense?
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Jenna Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 10:21 pm
If there is a good answer to this, I have no idea where to find it. I think the problem with holding on to the sealings done on earth with an iron grip is that there are so many different circumstances that we can’t give solutions for.
A popular LDS fiction series of books offers this situation: Woman is sealed to man, and he is rather mediocre through most of his life. Doesn’t attend the temple very often, only gives a half effort in his church callings, is a rather neglectful husband/father. Basically not really ‘celestial” material. Then, he changes and starts to do better. But he soon dies! The woman meets another man, a very kind, good, wonderful man who would give anything in the world to be sealed to her. He treats her like a queen their entire marriage and is the model father to her kids. Through all of this, he struggles with the idea that he is spending time with a woman he won’t get to be with because of her sealing to her first husband.
The question the book raises is, which man should the woman be with? Did her first husband honor his commitments the way he should have? Who will she “be with forever”?
This situation (which has certainly happened many times over in real life) and many others like it present problems we just can’t answer. Polygamy is another situation like this one I think, where we just can’t figure out how it all works it since we believe that “what is sealed on earth is sealed in heaven”.
I’m not sure I believe in polygamous Godhood (or whatever the best term would be) as there are so many people not sealed to anyone on the earth that are perfectly deserving of the opportunity to be exalted. Why is polygamy even instituted? It could be an answer as simple as God wants to test some in a different way.
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Sophia Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 11:16 pm
I think I would agree that it’s just probably one of those things that gets worked out on the other side, because you brought up another scenario that I had in mind, but I didn’t comment on. Or, when a good and faithful husband dies and leaves a young wife and little babies, and she remarries, and that man raises the children, and they have a long marriage, but they are never sealed because she can’t be unsealed… it does get tricky when you start putting temporal scenarios into play, and applying them to eternal situations. I’m ok with it being one of those “who knows, but it will work out” kind of things.
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Love these basic doctrine posts - I’m loving it also in Relief Society. It’s nice to revisit those basic tenets we hold to remind us of the core of our faith.
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3Jenna, or anyone that can answer this, I have a question about gender being eternal. I took a Psychology of Gender class that was eye popping at times, because I had no idea just how many different combinations of chromosomes, genitalia, and internal sex organs there could be. About 1 in 100 babies is born with some form of “mismatching” chromosomes/internal sex organs/genitalia, and 1 in 4000 are born with very obvious differences- for example, babies who have full female reproductive organs on the inside, but are born with penises, or boys who have testes and are chromosomally boys, but who didn’t develop a penis and have a vagina instead. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though, because you get into children who are fine until puberty, and suddenly a “boy” is growing breasts, or a girl has a vagina, but has undescended testes and no uterus, so she goes through puberty and never gets a period/breasts…
I guess my question is two-fold. What is the LDS stance on intersex children/adults, and how does that play into the “gender is eternal” doctrine? Or even more sticky, how does that play into the “no same sex marriage” doctrine? Technically, there can be a couple that both have XY chromosomes, but one can have a vagina and have been raised as a girl, yet have no female reproductive organs and instead have testes… it all gets so confusing, I know this might be a weird question, but it’s one that was brought up on another site about religion/gender and marriage, and this post reminded me of it.
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Jenna Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
TH and I have actually talked about this, and what we would do if we had a child who was explicitly intersex in some way. I say explicitly because I think there are many examples of people who are missing certain characteristics inherent to a specific gender but never know about it and live quite happily.
Although I know we are going to come off as a bit cliche when I say this, we decided that if we had a visibly intersex child that we would pray about it, and then make a choice about whether we wanted to raise a him or a her (based on what we felt like the Spirit was telling us we should do). Still so many problems that would need to be dealt with though, such as, would we tell the child what we did at the risk of causing confusion?
I don’t think the church has an official stance on the subject.
Unfortunately I think the ultimate answer is the sometimes frustrating one that LDS members often use, “We just don’t know how it will work out, but we have faith it will”. I think God is ultimately just and fair, and it’s a good thing I’m not Him because I have no idea how I would solve all of these complex problems and questions.
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Sophia Reply:
January 18th, 2010 at 9:51 pm
I don’t think they do either, I’ve looked when the topic first came up, and couldn’t find anything. I know that was kind of an off the wall question, but the gender topic in your post reminded me of it, thanks for addressing it- and you don’t sound cliche at all
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Jenna — does one have to be a member of the LDS church to be regarded as a Spirit Child? Are non church members lost children? Or non children?
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Jenna Reply:
January 19th, 2010 at 10:49 pm
Nope, everyone who has ever lived, and ever will live on the earth is a spirit child of God. I don’t think God considers non-members lost children like the lost boys of Peter Pan.
I think He would just think of them as children who haven’t discovered the way back to living with Him again. Happily, He gives us ample opportunity to find that true path!
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I love what you said but your scriptural references are not accurate.
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