“God’s Plan for a Forever Family,” Liahona, Dec. 2025.
God’s Plan for a Forever Family
Families who embrace God’s plan, love as the Savior loved, and honor their covenants will someday inherit “the blessings of eternal life and a fulness of joy.”
Near the end of my full-time mission, I rejoiced when I was endowed and sealed to my parents in the São Paulo Brazil Temple.
My parents, Apparecido and Mercedes, came from different religious backgrounds, but their life experiences prepared them to accept the restored gospel.
My father was raised in a good family but not religious. Nevertheless, as a young man he was interested in religion. He read the Bible, attended Bible classes, and studied the life of Jesus Christ. His studies caused him to have great interest in both the Savior’s gospel and the family, leaving him with a desire to marry someone of like mind.
By contrast, my mother came from a deeply religious family. They embraced gospel principles, attended church services, and faithfully practiced their religion. Growing up in that environment, my mother became the type of person who never missed a church meeting.
And so, after my parents married and my three brothers and I came along, they did their best to raise us within the light of their knowledge of gospel principles. One day my aunt, who was an inactive member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said to my father, “You have four boys, dear. If you really want to raise a family centered in Christ and have God in your family, you need to go to my church.”
My father heard what she said, but he didn’t take any action until the day the full-time missionaries tracted in our neighborhood, knocked on our door, and began teaching us. He quickly realized that they represented the church my aunt had encouraged him to investigate.
Light and Truth
One of the things that initially interested my parents in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is the importance the Church places on the family and the teaching that “much of God’s work of salvation and exaltation is accomplished through the family.” Before they were baptized, my parents were so impressed with what they were learning that they invited neighbors to join them for the missionary lessons.
One of the things that initially interested my parents in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is the importance the Church places on the family.
As they met with the missionaries, and continued studying the gospel after their baptism, my parents learned of ways “to bring up [their] children in light and truth” and how to spiritually “set in order [their] own house” (Doctrine and Covenants 93:40, 43).
They learned that “the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children” and that “happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
They learned that “successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities.”
They learned that families can be eternal and that the “same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:2).
And they learned that “the ultimate purpose of every teaching, every activity in the Church is that parents and their children are happy at home, sealed in an eternal marriage, and linked to their generations.”
With that knowledge, they desired to be sealed as a forever family.
An Eye Toward Eternity
After my parents were baptized, they practiced what they were learning, moving from the world to the gospel kingdom. They worked to unite our family by having home evening and family scripture study, faithfully attending Church meetings, and doing family history work. With those efforts toward unity, they hoped to create a family centered on the plan of salvation with an eye toward eternity.
In 1965, the year my parents were baptized, the closest temple to São Paulo, Brazil, was in Mesa, Arizona, almost 6,000 miles (9,650 km) away. Travel was too expensive for our family, so my parents had to wait until the dedication of the São Paulo Brazil Temple in 1978 before they could receive their temple ordinances and be sealed. At that time, I was serving a mission in Rio de Janeiro.
About two months before I concluded my mission in February 1980, my mission president allowed my companion and me to travel overnight with stake members from Rio de Janeiro to the temple in São Paulo so I could be endowed and sealed to my parents. Like my parents, I had waited years for the promised blessings of temple ordinances and covenants.
That experience changed my vision of the future and gave me my first glimpse of the truthfulness of President Russell M. Nelson’s recent words: “Time in the temple will help you to think celestial and to catch a vision of who you really are, who you can become, and the kind of life you can have forever.”
My brief time in the temple on that occasion deeply influenced the remainder of my missionary service. With that new vision, testifying of the temple and the importance of God’s plan for families also had a lasting impact on my life.
When my wife, Rosana, and I married two years after my mission, we were sealed in the temple with a vision of raising our own eternal family. To do so, we worked together to create family traditions like the ones our parents had taught us, all focused on the Savior, His teachings, and the teachings of His modern-day prophets.
Today our children are raising their children with the same gospel principles of happiness. For us, family is everything because we understand the centrality of the family in God’s plan.
As a General Authority, I had the blessing of sealing my three children to their spouses in the temple. Looking into their eyes the moment they knelt at the altar in the temple was a beautiful experience. I could see my posterity being blessed by the same gospel principles my parents had taught me and that Rosana and I had taught them. I could see those blessings continuing in future generations. And I was reminded of who makes it all possible.
A Christmas Reminder
Family is central to God’s plan of happiness, but without the Savior Jesus Christ, that plan would not be possible. His Atonement and the ordinances and covenants found in His gospel make possible the promise of exaltation.
President Nelson has declared: “Exaltation is a family affair. Only through the saving ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ can families be exalted. The ultimate end for which we strive is that we become happy as a family—endowed, sealed, and prepared for eternal life in the presence of God.”
When I visit places I’ve never seen before, I try to find a small Nativity scene that reminds Rosana and me of the Savior. I’m building quite a collection.
While contemplating those humble Nativity scenes, my wife and I once pondered, “What is it that truly matters most in our lives?” The answer, of course, is the Savior, His gospel, and our family. To remind us of our Heavenly Father’s love for us and that it is through the Savior that the promise of eternal families becomes possible, before Christmas a few years ago we placed all our Nativities on two big shelves in our home—and left them up rather than put them away after the Christmas holidays. That tradition helps us keep the spirit of Christmas in our home year-round.
Every day as we look at those Nativity scenes, they gently remind us of the Savior’s central role in our lives. They remind us that peace on earth now (see Luke 2:14) and eternal happiness in the next world depend on the Savior and on honoring the covenants we have made with Him. And they remind us “that he came into the world, even Jesus, to be crucified for the world, and to bear the sins of the world, and to sanctify the world, and to cleanse it from all unrighteousness;
“That through him all might be saved whom the Father had put into his power and made by him” (Doctrine and Covenants 76:41–42).
Just as we learned these truths from our parents, Rosana and I have worked to pass them on to our children. Now our children are teaching these same truths to their children. The seeds planted in the hearts of my parents 60 years ago in our small home in Brazil have blossomed and yielded fruit “which is most precious, which is sweet above all that is sweet, and which is white above all that is white, yea, and pure above all that is pure” (Alma 32:42).
I testify that those who embrace God’s plan for families, love as the Savior loved, and honor their covenants will someday inherit “the blessings of eternal life and a fulness of joy” with their loved ones and with the Father and the Son.