Heritage

I’ll never forget the day several years ago when I was working in the kitchen doing all the normal things you do like wiping down the cupboards and cleaning out the microwave when suddenly while wringing out the dishcloth in the sink a shock went through me. The hands wringing water out of the cloth weren’t mine! They were my mother’s. How had her hands become attached to the end of my arms? It was a strange moment of discovery that I was aging, but more than that it was a moment of realization that I was becoming my mother. Genetically I had been programmed to have her hands.

Since that day I can’t look at my hands without thinking about my mother which means that I think about her about a hundred times a day. (Try to count how many times a day you see your hands!)And whenever I see her hands, I know what mine will be like in 20 years.

It is easy for most of us to look in a mirror and see the things about us that we inherited from our parents. But what isn’t as easy is identifying what we inherited from our Heavenly Parents. For some reason we let a false sense of humility keep us from acknowledging traits we inherited from Them. But that isn’t humility at all.
As Christmas approaches, I challenge you to identify at least two characteristics you inherited from your Heavenly Father and then to concentrate on those two things throughout the month. Of course, they won't be perfected like His traits are, but you will have those traits in a lesser form. Make it your Christmas gift to God to enhance them and to be grateful for them.

I’m in the middle of parents and children now, and I also know how delightful it is to notice myself in my children—especially my good qualities. Seeing your good characteristics in them is a true source of joy, and I’m sure that our Father in Heaven also experiences joy when we recognize and acknowledge ways we are like Him. After all He gave us those traits and as He said, “What doth it profit a man if a gift is bestowed upon him, and he receive [acknowledges] not the gift? Behold, he rejoices not in that which is given unto him, neither rejoices in him who is the giver of the gift” (D&C 88:33).