Families Can Be Together Forever

So if you know me at all, you know that my older brother got married yesterday. And if you know me extraordinarily well, you know that yesterday was a particularly long day and that I was decidedly irascible by the end of it. Downright cantankerous. Most definitely no longer my usually even-tempered self. But that is neither here nor there, since this is a post I meant to write before my brother got married.

I taught Primary for two years before I started going to singles and student wards again, and kids are always intelligent and usually surprising. Anyway, I remember teaching a lesson about eternal families and watching one of the little boys in my class wrinkle his nose and say, "You mean I'm stuck with my older brother forever?"

After that class, I wondered if I'd ever had a similar reaction. Especially since my older brother and I only started to get along recently. (By recently, I mean "in the last couple of years or so, and even then he still has no sense of boundaries and tends to enjoy stepping over the line periodically") At the time of that lesson, he was just beginning to show hints of being a semi-decent human being. In my estimation, anyway.

So I went back and looked through one of my old journals. From my teen years. Melodrama, angst, and many entries about my relationships with my siblings. Once such entry read, "Today we had a lesson in Young Women about how families can be together forever--and that, by definition, is heaven. Well, I think that having to spend eternity with [older brother] would be hell." (Well, actually . . . the word hell was underlined many times and there's just no way to duplicate that on my blog.)

But now that I'm beginning to get older, I can see how eternal family could be the definition of heaven after all. Especially when I think about how my brother is a better person when he's around his wife. Not that he was an entirely bad person to begin with, but this whole concept of eternal family with her . . . it obviously has an effect. A good one.

So for today . . . though yesterday was long, though the evening went longer than planned, though I had the beginnings of a splitting hunger headache when I left the reception--I'm glad that he's married to her forever.

Because that means I get to be around nice people for eternity.