In the following video, two young women share their secret for confidence and self-worth:
True Confidence
What stood out to me was that they did not need other people to tell them they were beautiful because they had already received an assurance from God that they were.
The next video I would like to present is an interview with Al Fox. I posted about Al back in April:
The Lord Looketh Upon the Heart
In this video she begins by again telling about her conversion, but then she moves on to talk about finding faith:
Finding Faith
"What is comes down to is prayer, really," says Al Fox, "honest prayer, where you can ask Him anything. It relies wholly on us, 'cause he doesn't ever leave us. What's really helped me is making that decision, and being firm in it. To choose who you want to follow, choose who to trust, choose to have faith, choose to keep going, and that is when Heavenly Father follows through with His promises and your faith is strengthened and blessings and opportunities come."
Then she says that if we have a question, "Don't turn to the Internet, don't turn to other people. It's important, and like if you want to know if God's there, ask Him, and if you have a question, ask Him."
There it is again. Don't depend on other people, depend on God. Don't wait for other people to tell you that you have value, go to God and ask Him.
More than two years ago I received an answer from God regarding my value as an individual. I was watching this video:
"I Am a Son of God
When, in the video, Moses declared "I am a son of God", I said "Of course!" The answer was so clear, and it was confirmed by the presence of the Holy Ghost. One of the biggest lies put out there by Satan is that anyone -- you, me or anyone else -- is inferior to others. We are all God's children and as such we all have value. As the motivational speaker Hyrum Smith has argued, God told Moses three things that apply equally to us: He is God, we are His children, and He has work for us to do. "Is there anything we can't do knowing that," asks Hyrum.
With this answer from God, I told the adversary to take a hike, to go sell that inferiority line to someone else because I was no longer buying it. I felt stronger than I had in a long time, and this whole experience launched me forward. But, as Elder Jeffrey R. Holland says in the video above, even after great revelatory moments like that experienced by Moses, and by myself to a much lesser extent, the danger has not passed. The adversary will not rest, he will look for an area of weakness and try to exploit it.
Over the many months that followed my epiphany, the adversary found such a weakness in me. I was, at the time, typing up old journals on my computer, which led me to give much thought to the past. As a writer and a historian I want to get things right, and will do as much research as I need to do in order to get it right. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the past and identified the doubts about myself that I used to carry around, but I did this so much that I started to entertain those doubts again.
I found myself wanting old friends to tell me that I was more than just the nice guy everybody said I was in high school. I was looking in the wrong places for an answer I already had. A few days ago I said in prayer that I was just stumbling around in the dark. Then, on Monday and Tuesday, I found the first two videos I have shared in this post. That's when it became clear that I had been looking in the wrong places and that I had already received an answer from the source of all truth.
I am a child of God
And He has sent me here.
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