When I reported on my missionary service, a member of the high council asked me, “What did your parents do to prepare you for a successful mission?”
I thought about all the family nights, bedtime prayers, temple trips, and morning studies—all the tried-and-true gospel formulas. They were good, but they didn’t prevent my mission from being hard. And they certainly didn’t prevent me from making mistakes, even when I knew better.
There are all kinds of ways to equip your children with gospel truths and prepare them for success in the mission field. But even the most gospel-savvy kids will have their faith tested—before and after their missions. You can’t prevent that.
As far as I can tell, there’s only one world-proof shield that you can send them with—and it matters more than you may realize.
Knowing Your Testimony
We often revere the selfless courage of the stripling soldiers, 2,000 young men who protected their covenant-keeping parents and turned the tide of a gruesome battle:
“Now they never had fought, yet they did not fear death; and they did think more upon the liberty of their fathers than they did upon their lives.”
Their subsequent victory was miraculous. They’d been blessed and protected. We teach lessons about their mothers equipping them with the armor of God. We talk about the sons’ fearless, seemingly doubt-free leap into the heart of battle.
Those details may be true. At the heart of this story, though, is an indication of what their mothers actually sent them with:
“… [T]hey had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them. And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it.”
Armed with Your Assurance
It doesn’t say that these young men—boys, some of them—didn’t doubt. It doesn’t say, “They knew it.” Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t.
What it does say is that they’d been taught. What it does say is that they were certain that their mothers knew it. They knew that their mothers (and fathers) knew God. They knew that their parents believed in them. They’d been taught their divine identity, and they’d been taught to trust.
In short, they’d been armed with assurance. And that was enough.
Send Them with Your Certainty
As a missionary, I often walked out the door in the morning with doubts on my mind and questions in my heart. But never did I wonder what my parents believed. Never once did I wonder whether my own beliefs could one day, through experience, become convictions. And never once did I wonder whether I was loved.
Your kids will doubt and question their beliefs, just as you did. Some days, being a missionary really does feel like fighting through a battlefield of confusion and hostility.
Every single stripling warrior survived, but every single one had been wounded. And I think it’s safe to say that, for any doubts or fears they’d carried out the door, these young men returned home with their own tested and proven certainty.
So, if you send your kids on their missions and they sustain metaphorical wounds, don’t panic. Reassure. Testify. Love. It takes real-world experiences to produce real-world faith. And wounds introduce us to our Healer in a way nothing else can.
Your children may not have their own certainty yet. So, send them with yours. You may think your kids already know what you believe, but don’t leave any room for them to wonder.
Make your love, certainty, and confidence indisputably clear. Give them your abiding assurance. Give them something true and real to rehearse in the heat of their hardest battles, and in time, He will bring them home.
More articles for you:
▶ 16 gifts any missionary will love
▶ What to say to help your missionary through a hard time
▶ ‘We had to know more’: Family from Florida joins the Church after meeting members while camping in Utah
