A great deal

This week's post is brought to us by Tonia A. She brings us some great thoughts on literacy and scripture study in our families. Enjoy! Thanks, Tonia!

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There is a certain blog I like to follow. As I read it, I feel inspired to be better but not discouraged because I don’t measure up. I feel good about what I am doing in my own efforts as a mother, a daughter of God, a wife and a regular person just trying to do her best. The blogger writes it in a way that helps me to realize that she is real and that it is ok for me to be real. Not perfect, but trying and failing, sometimes succeeding but always trying.

The other day Steve and I were talking about literacy. He mentioned something about health literacy. He said that even if you are very literate you may have low health literacy. Something about not being well read or having a good understanding of a particular health condition….never thought about it that way.

So does that mean we can be literate, but have low doctrinal literacy? In health literacy you can read a lot but if you don’t understand the words, good luck. Anyone know what a sphygmomanometer is? When I think of doctrinal literacy and not understanding the words, I think of the Old Testament and Isaiah. I read it, ok not that often, but when I have read it, I don’t understand it.

What about our kids? We are reading the large print Book of Mormon for Latter-day Saint Families with the kids in the morning. It’s a great copy as it has lots of teaching tools. This helps us to add interesting facts and to ask “insightful” questions to the kids. Trust me, we need to do anything and everything we can some mornings to capture their interest. One is worried about getting to the bus on time, another is still eating breakfast, a third is rubbing sleep from the eyes. Some days we just read….as quickly as we can just to get it in before the bus really does come. Some days we do miss the bus because we were a little slower moving. Other days we get started soon enough to ask questions. I think this is when we have a fighting chance of building doctrinal literacy. Steve said that helping patients become more health literate is vital in building a “healthy” (pun intended) self-reliance in the patients. They take greater ownership of their health status.

I bet the same applies to our kids. For them to take greater ownership of their “spiritual” status they need to understand the words. We’ve taken a lot of different approaches to family scripture study. Sometimes we have to adjust how we go about it because what worked once doesn’t seem to be working any more.

Elder Bednar taught that consistency is what matters. Even though our efforts may not be perfect, as we strive to have family scripture study, just like my “blogger friend,” we need to keep trying. Eventually our children will become doctrinally literate and it will build their testimonies. They will become spiritually self-reliant.

Perhaps this is where reading the scriptures helps with reading literacy and builds doctrinal literacy at the same time. Not a bad two-fer.