Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas S. Monson

Monson reaches for a small, familiar image to do a large, socially necessary job: make absence feel survivable. The sparrow line borrows authority from the New Testament, but it also functions as a rhetorical shortcut. If God is attentive to something as disposable as a bird, then your private catastrophe is not beneath divine notice. That scale shift is the emotional engine here, shrinking the distance between heaven and a parent’s gut-level fear.

The sentence is built to soothe without arguing. “I am certain” is pastoral certainty offered as a loan to the anxious listener. “Looks with compassion” frames God less as judge than witness, a crucial recalibration for people who might be wondering whether their pain is punishment. Then comes the careful euphemism: “called upon to part.” No one is blamed, and no one is forced to name the cause - military deployment, church service, migration for work, custody arrangements, illness. The phrase implies duty and inevitability, which dignifies the sacrifice while softening any anger that might otherwise have to be aimed somewhere.

Even “even temporarily” does double work. It recognizes that separation is its own trauma while quietly reasserting a horizon of return. And “precious children” is not ornamental sentiment; it is an insistence on the moral weight of the bond, validating grief without letting it curdle into despair. In a faith community that often asks people to endure disruptions for larger callings, the subtext is clear: obedience may take you away, but you are not abandoned in the leaving.