The Deadliest Wolf
Inspired by chapter 29
Bruce C Hafen of the First Quorum of the Seventy gave a talk titled "Covenant Marriage" and in that talk he spoke about every
marriage being tested repeatedly by three kinds of wolves. A very
interesting metaphor and knowing how venomous a bad marriage can be I
think it fits pretty well.
Instead of explaining the three wolves in my own words I think it would be best to quote Brother Hafen's own words:
Every marriage is tested repeatedly by
three kinds of wolves. The first wolf is natural adversity. After asking
God for years to give them a first child, David and Fran had a baby
with a serious heart defect. Following a three-week struggle, they
buried their newborn son. Like Adam and Eve before them, they mourned
together, brokenhearted, in faith before the Lord.8
Second,
the wolf of their own imperfections will test them. One woman told me
through her tears how her husband’s constant criticism finally destroyed
not only their marriage but her entire sense of self-worth. He first
complained about her cooking and housecleaning, and then about how she
used her time, how she talked, looked, and reasoned. Eventually she felt
utterly inept and dysfunctional. My heart ached for her, and for him.
Contrast
her with a young woman who had little self-confidence when she first
married. Then her husband found so much to praise in her that she
gradually began to believe she was a good person and that her opinions
mattered. His belief in her rekindled her innate self-worth.
The
third wolf is the excessive individualism that has spawned today’s
contractual attitudes. A seven-year-old girl came home from school
crying, “Mom, don’t I belong to you? Our teacher said today that nobody
belongs to anybody—children don’t belong to parents, husbands don’t
belong to wives. I am yours,
aren’t I, Mom?” Her mother held her close and whispered, “Of course
you’re mine—and I’m yours, too.” Surely marriage partners must respect
one another’s individual identity, and family members are neither slaves
nor inanimate objects. But this teacher’s fear, shared today by many,
is that the bonds of kinship and marriage are not valuable ties that
bind, but are, instead, sheer bondage. Ours is the age of the waning of
belonging.
Out
of the three Wolves I feel is most damaging to our world in this day
and age is “excessive individualism”. Until recently the family until
was also a communal unit and what I mean by that is that the old saying
that “it takes a tribe to raise a child” was commonplace. If my child
acted out while I wasn’t around another parent close to the family
wouldn’t hesitate to reprimand and inform the parents of this or
otherwise take that child as if it was their own. In this day and age if
another parent or even family member even dares look at a child wrong,
all heck breaks loose and a great offense has been made. Look at the
relationship between parent, student, and teacher. In this current age
we often see that the teacher is the one unbelieved when the child comes
“crying wolf” for failing in grade or for being corrected in behavior
by the teacher. Before our current time we would see both teacher and
parent ensuring the child failed or passed based on its own merits and
without excuse.
We
also see in this day and age where there are parents who don’t even
parent or make important decisions for their own child due to not
wanting to “step on their child’s toes” even though that child could be a
young as a toddler. Some are even going as far as stating that we
should ask permission of our babies in order to change a soiled diaper.
So many are living in a perversion of what the family and society is
intended to be.
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