I Am a Child of God

This is yet another essay written for my Strengthening Marriage and Family class, winter of 2011. This essay was a "personal application" essay, and, to be honest, has taken some serious guts for me to post here. I've included the references, in case anyone is interested. Feel free to leave (positive) comments below, or to email me with any questions.


I Am a Child of God


The society we live in today is not kind to a young woman’s self-perception. She’s too fat, too thin, too tall, too short, too smart, too dumb, too promiscuous, too prudish, too quiet, too loud. She’s always put down, rarely lifted up. She spends her life striving for some ridiculous ideal that she can never quite put her finger on, but that exists “out there” somewhere, proliferated by media influences, peers, and her own insecurities. I know all of this from personal experience. People tell me I’m smart, pretty, and talented. Yet it often feels like nothing I do is quite good enough, no matter how hard I try I’m not pretty enough, and no matter how often people remind me that I’m a child of God it doesn’t seem to stick in my brain. The Family Proclamation says that “Each [human being] is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny” (The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles, 1995, ¶ 2). This paper is about applying principles of the Family Proclamation in our own lives. I have chosen to focus on that line from paragraph two to apply in my life, since remembering my own worth is something that I have struggled with for years. In order to apply this principle in my life, I have read scriptures and Ensign articles about self-worth and self-image, participated in the BYU Women’s Services 10-Day Body Image Challenge, and found friends that I can confide in. As I have been practicing applying this doctrine in my life, I have yet to master the principle, but living it—although imperfectly—has already helped me vastly improve my self-perception. For me, the journey to solid self-esteem is on-going.

Readings on Self-Image
There are many talks and Ensign articles about self worth, divine nature, and our royal heritage. After reading through many of these texts, I have found a few gems of wisdom that have particularly helped me with my own struggles. Perhaps my favorite of these is an excerpt from a Liahona article entitled “The Worth of Souls is Great.” It says, “Where… [many] sisters are mistaken, is in judging their worth by their circumstances or how they appear to others. They have forgotten that we all have inherent worth simply because we are daughters of God! Though our lives and circumstances may change, our worth does not.” (“The worth of”, 1989, 7). In all my reading of Church literature, I have rarely come across something that struck me so personally. While I by no means considered myself a slave to fashion or similar trends, I do very much care how I am perceived by others. I get self-conscious far too easily and far too often, and that self-consciousness often turns into feelings of insecurity, worthlessness, and self-doubt. What I need to remember is that my worth has been set in the eternities and will not change, no matter my temporal circumstances at the immediate moment.

Another favorite quote that I came across was in Elder Richard G. Scott’s conference address titled “The Sanctity of Womanhood.” Elder Scott says, “So many of our sisters are disheartened, even discouraged, and disillusioned….Satan has unleashed a seductive campaign to undermine the sanctity of womanhood, to deceive the daughters of God and divert them from their divine destiny.” (Scott, 2000, 36). Disheartened, discouraged, disillusioned—all words that can describe how I personally have felt at one point or another. The world does such a wonderful job of tearing down the self-esteem of women (especially young women), and it is difficult to remain positive in such a derogatory environment. When I read Elder Scott’s quote, what comes to mind at the end is “Never give up; never surrender.” Though the devil himself fights against us with all his “hail and mighty storm,” as it says in Helaman 5:12, we must never give in to the battering of the adversary. So many of us are disheartened, discouraged, and disillusioned with life because of the negative environment that society tends to thrust upon us. We are so hard on ourselves—I am so hard on myself—because of what the world tells us, and tend to forget what the Lord tells us. The world tells us of our shortcomings, our failures, and our nothingness; the Lord tells us of our worth, our potential, and our divine heritage.

What this all boils down to for me is a positive attitude. If I have a positive outlook on life and on myself, then I am more likely to see potential, rather than potholes. If I remember that I am literally a spirit child of God, then it will be easier for me to remember that my worth is great, and not only is my worth great, but it is unchanging. In order to foster a more positive attitude about the world around me, I began keeping a gratitude journal. In it I recorded things I was grateful for, from flowers, rain, and sunshine to my body’s ability to laugh, run, and dance. The more I thought about it, the more I had for which to be grateful. Similarly, I kept in my personal journal a running list of things that I like about myself. This task was monumental for me. I do not like attention drawn to me, and I do not like to brag. Thus, recording things daily that I like about myself is not an easy task for me. The positive traits started out small—“my hair cooperated today and didn’t look awful”—but soon grew to more sweeping realizations about my own character and talents—“I am caring and compassionate, and someday I will make a great mother.” Recording these things was not a way for me to boast about how awesome I am; rather, it was an opportunity for me to learn to love myself, without an ounce of conceit. This was a healthy relationship with myself that I was beginning, and one that I am still working on today.

10-Day Challenge
One resource I discovered on my journey to better self-esteem is the BYU Women’s Services office on campus. The first event hosted by them that I heard of was the 10-day body image challenge. Because of my history with poor self-image, I decided to sign up and participate. This challenge had me do things like read quotes, scriptures, and talks, record thoughts in my journal daily, exercise for fun, and make a list of things I love about myself as a person and things I love about my body itself. As a child of God, I have been given the divine gift of a physical body. God loves me and He created this body for me. However, I have been so trained by society to hate my appearance and to always want to change or improve something about my body that seeing this 5’8” chunk of flesh and bones as a divine inheritance was difficult at best.

I remember crying as I sat to make the list of 10 things I love about my body; I got to number 2 and had run out of ideas. There was no way I was ever going to come up with a whole 10 things I loved about my body! My mind flashed back to emotions, feelings, and thoughts I had had before. I remembered the times I felt fat, ugly, misshapen, and unattractive. I recalled the days where I had looked in the mirror and nit-picked about my face, my hair, my skin, my teeth, hating what I saw but hating even more what I felt. I remembered that awful summer when my self-esteem sank so low that I was never pleased with my shape, no matter what my friends told me. That summer when I felt ugly and unwanted. That summer when I struggled with bulimia. That summer that was my own personal hell. I never wanted to go back to those feelings, never wanted to be anywhere near where I was emotionally that summer. But here I was, sitting on my bed trying to make a list of things I liked about my body, flashing back to those awful memories. I knew that none of those feelings came from God, but in that instant it was hard for me to see why I should like my body, why I should regard it as a sacred gift given to me by a loving Heavenly Father.

Then, in a moment of clarity of thought, I remembered—I remembered why my body is so sacred, why I should love it, flaws and all. Heavenly Father gave me this body. He created me in His likeness. “All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God.” (The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles, 1995, ¶2). Would I ever criticize God, especially on something as shallow as outward appearance? No, never. Would I want Him to hear my belittling and bemoaning the very body He gave to me, created to look like His? Not in the least. Why, then, would I worry about my outward appearance to such a degree? The answer lies in Elder Scott’s quote from earlier: “Satan has unleashed a seductive campaign to undermine the sanctity of womanhood, to deceive the daughters of God and divert them from their divine destiny” (Scott, 2000, 36). Satan was the root of all of this self-hatred. How dare I let him win this battle! How dare I slander the God-given gift that is my body! With this fire in my veins I sat down to start again on the list of 10 things I love about my body. After a few more tears of frustration, I finished the list.
The 10-day body image challenge is perhaps the best thing I have ever done for myself. It didn’t magically fix all my self-image issues, but it gave me some tools to use for reminding myself that I am a “beloved [daughter] of heavenly parents, and, as such, [have] a divine nature and destiny” (The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles, 1995, ¶2).

Friends I can Confide In
I started this essay somewhat bashing today’s society and all its negativity, but not everything about society is inherently bad. One major example of this fact is friendship—no one is meant to go through this life alone, and everyone needs a good friend they can lean on when times get tough. The key word there is “good” friend. We all need a Christ-like shoulder to cry on every once in a while, and for me this was an important part of learning self-esteem. I mentioned earlier a miserable summer that I endured. During that time, I turned to two of what I then considered my closest friends for support with my struggles with bulimic tendencies. These two friends happened to be non-Mormon males, and they were not the Christ-like friends that I needed at that time. They both assured me, vigorously, that I was in fact, not unattractive. But for some reason, hearing that from them made the problem worse; now all I could think about was how to become more attractive, more appealing to them. The thoughts and feelings I was having got worse.

Eventually, after moving back to Provo (away from those peers and situations I had been in all summer long), I was able to get my head out of the self-loathing funk it had been in for months. The problem didn’t completely disappear, but it went far enough to the back of my mind that I could pretend it wasn’t there anymore. But, as most lurking problems do, my self-hating reared its ugly head again—this time while I was dating a wonderful returned missionary who, I was sure, did not want to deal with this crazy chick’s issues. He and I had been dating for no more than a few months at this point, but already I could tell that he was the kind of Christ-like friend I needed to help get me through the struggles I was having. One night, I simply broke down crying and told him everything—the past mistakes, the self-image issues, the bulimic tendencies, all of it. He held me as I cried, reminded me that he thinks I’m beautiful, and, most importantly, reminded me that God loves me more than anything. He helped me to work through the pain and the self-loathing, to begin to see what he and God saw in me—inherent worth and beauty, regardless of outward appearances. He was the kind of friend I needed. He was the kind of friend I could confide in, and because of his loving responses, I was able to begin to see the good in myself. I found that I didn’t need to change my appearance or lose weight to be beautiful to him—or to God. I didn’t have to fuss and fidget and pluck and primp to get a guy’s attention. I didn’t have to be a slave to those awful thoughts that had ensnared me before. I could finally be simply myself. And it was a wonderful feeling.

Conclusion
This process is far from being over. I still struggle—sometimes daily—with feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, and unattractiveness, but things are looking up for me. I can still find things that I like about myself, I still have days where I can feel pretty, and I am learning to more consistently have a positive outlook about myself and about life. That wonderful RM that held me and helped me through my struggle for self-worth is now my wonderful fiancé, and he still stands beside me as I work through days of fault-finding and nit-picking about myself. Though just a small phrase in the Family Proclamation, the line I focused on—“Each [human being] is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny”—has helped me to strive more continuously for a positive self image that is more in line with God’s view of me. What best sums up my experience was recorded in my journal from just the second day of the 10-day challenge: “Confidence—not pride, conceit, or arrogance—is where true beauty stems from. I know that, in the grand scheme of things, I am ‘less than the dust of the earth’ but I also recognize that I have such infinite worth. I am a child of God. My worth cannot be diminished.”


References
First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles. (1995, November), The family: A proclamation to the world, Ensign, 25(11), 102.
Scott, R. G. (2000, May). The sanctity of womanhood. Ensign, 36.
The worth of souls is great. (1989, September). Liahona, 7.