Answer

What If My Life Doesn't Look Like the Family Proclamation?

You read the Proclamation and your life does not match the picture. Single, divorced, childless, raised in something you are trying not to repeat, or in a family that fell apart. Sitting in a lesson about eternal families while your own is nothing like it is genuinely hard.

Then you are most people, and the document was written for you as much as for anyone. The Proclamation describes a pattern. It is not a membership requirement, and reading it as a checklist you pass or fail gets the genre wrong.

Eternal Truths

A pattern is most useful to someone whose circumstances do not match it. The Family: A Proclamation to the World tells you what God has said about marriage, children and parents, so you know what to build toward and what to want for the people you love. It also says plainly that disability, death and other circumstances may require individual adaptation.

No faithful disciple is predestined to receive less than all the Father has. Elder D. Todd Christofferson said exactly that, acknowledging that much can be achieved in less than ideal circumstances and testifying that the Atonement will in the end compensate all deprivation and loss (“Why Marriage, Why Family”). Your current situation is not an eternal position.

Christ took on your specific circumstances, not the general case. Alma wrote that He took upon Himself pains, afflictions and infirmities so that He would know how to succour His people according to their infirmities (Alma 7:11-12). That includes the particular shape of what your life did not turn out to be.

What Can Make This Confusing?

The damage is done when difference starts to feel like failure, and that is worth naming separately from the circumstances themselves. Nothing has gone wrong with you because your household is not the one in the lesson. And if your family was where you were hurt, the Proclamation is not a description of what you had. It is a description of what was owed to you and did not arrive, and its warning paragraph is aimed at people who did what was done to you.

Questions to Think About

• Am I reading this as a vision or as a report card?
• Which part of it is actually available to me right now?
• What am I mourning that I have never said out loud to anyone?

What You Can Do

Take the Proclamation’s list of practices and pick the one you could start this week in the family you actually have, whoever that is. People who built something different from what they were given almost always describe starting with one thing and keeping it, not with a transformation. The essay behind this answer goes further into adapting the pattern to a real life.

Jesus Christ is building something in you that your circumstances did not get a vote on, and the promises attached to families are made on a horizon longer than your lifetime.