Question
Dear Gramps,
Like many women, I have (really) struggled for decades with jealousy and plural marriage. I fear the Millennium because of the intimacy that will come with plural marriage. Any insight you can give to me, I will be grateful for.
Ann
Answer
Dear Ann,
I understand your concern, one shared by many Latter-day Saint women and more than a few Latter-day Saint men.
At the end of the first session of the October 2019 General Conference, President Oaks of the First Presidency delivered a masterful sermon titled “Trust in the Lord“, which I encourage you to review. To begin his talk, Elder Oaks related the following incident:
My dear brothers and sisters, a letter I received some time ago introduces the subject of my talk. The writer was contemplating a temple marriage to a man whose eternal companion had died. She would be a second wife. She asked this question: would she be able to have her own house in the next life, or would she have to live with her husband and his first wife? I just told her to trust the Lord.
There are many things about the next life that we simply do not know. Will we eat together at a table? Live in houses? Sleep? We are promised that we will be eternally sealed to our spouses, our parents, and our children. But exactly what will be the nature of those relationships? When parents and children are equally grown, equally wise, and equally perfect, what does it mean to be parent and child? It means something, certainly, something very important—but also something that in some ways will be far different from what we experience here and now. Just how much like this life will the next be? What things, perhaps as yet unknown to us, will we find of primary concern, and what things that we worry about today will we then see to be no concern at all?
That is not to say that we know nothing about the next life. On the contrary, the Prophet Joseph Smith taught:
…that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory, which glory we do not now enjoy.
Your husband will still be your husband in every good and intimate and important way, and you will still be his wife in the same ways. The eternal glory that awaits us undoubtedly comes with an endowment of knowledge and understanding that will allow us to live with a fullness of joy in a state that we can hardly now even contemplate. Nothing precious and of eternal value between you and your husband (or anyone else) will be lost. Nothing worthy will be taken from you, only added to you.
God is a loving Father who seeks to give us the unthinkable joy that he himself experiences. What that joy will look like is only dimly visible to us here in mortality. But the same epistle in which the apostle Paul warns that “now we seek through a glass, darkly” also assures us that:
Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
A literally unimaginable glory and joy await us. As the Lord himself so wisely and gently taught us, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Let us put aside worries about the life to come regarding things we don’t know about and that don’t even touch us today.
God is good, and so are all of his works. His promises are just and true, and you have his promise of joy beyond your current comprehension. However things turn out to be in the heavens, they will be wonderful for all who dwell there, including God’s daughters. Including you. Trust in the Lord, Sister Ann.
Gramps
