Elder Ballard received the following letter: "I have a wonderful husband and children, whom I love deeply. I love the Lord and His Church more than I can say. I know the church is true! I realize I shouldn't feel discouraged about who I am. Yet I have been going through an identy crisis most of my life. I have never dared utter these feelings out loud but have hidden them behind the huge, confident smile I wear to church every week. For years I have doubted if I had any value beyond my roles as a wife and mother. I have feared that men are that they might have joy, but that women are that they might be overlooked. I long to feel that I, as a woman, matter to the Lord."
I have been thinking a lot lately about discouragement, and how Satan uses this tool to attack especially the women in the world. Our discouragement can be so huge that it looks like a mountain that we just don't know if we can climb.
How does one build self-esteem? Elder Faust suggests some keys for a healthy self-esteem:
1. Keep your agency. Do not surrender self-control or yield to habits that bind, to addictions that enslave, nor to conduct that destroys.
2. Humility. The key to an adequate self-esteem is humility. Humility that comes with inner peace. It is humility that allows us to accept and live with our own warts, without cosmetics to hide them.
3. Honesty. Honesty begins with being true to one's own self.
4. Love of God. Some carry an extra burden of guilt from grievous sins. Transgression is so devastating to self-esteem. Through the atonement of Jesus Christ, self-worth can be completely restored.
If Satan can make us feel that we are nothing, that we are worthless, then he can squish the power that is within us to do great things. Nephi prophesied that we of the Latter days would be "armed with...the power of God in great glory". (1 Ne. 14:14) How do we grab onto and use this power?
We must do the essentials: 1. Invite personal revelation. 2. Pray always. 3. Study the scriptures daily. 4. Take time to ponder and fast. 5. Make and keep your covenants. 6. Love one another.
Sisters, let's do the essential things every day and see if our self-worth increases, our discouragement lessen, even fades away, and we grab onto the pwoer of God, and move mountains!
Sister Strupp
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