9-4-11 YW’s Lesson

Today I had to teach the joint lesson for Young Women’s. The lesson was about every young woman having divine worth. Jacob said I wasn’t qualified to teach the lesson, and I’ll admit that the thing that I struggle most with is feeling like I have worth. He grows weary of my constant complaining that I’m too this or not enough that, and I grow weary of always feeling that way. I know I’m not unique in feeling worthless, as I listen to my sister complain to me about herself the same way I complain about myself. I know that it’s not just my sister and I that feel that way as I watch young women make choices that reflect how they feel about themselves and what they think it means to have worth.

I started with talking about worth – what is it? Today I defined worth as “having value.” I had the girls list the things that the world says makes a person worth something. Clothes, weight, appearance, accomplishments, money, popularity, jobs, and physical attributes were some of the things that they named. Then we defined divine worth as “having eternal value” and listed things that made us of worth in the eyes of Heavenly Father. And of course it was all the things that mattered – charity, kindness, knowledge, obedience, and knowing you’re a child of God. We compared the two lists and crossed off everything on the world’s list that wasn’t eternal, which left our list empty. After doing that I wrote a statement on the board that said, “We are children of divine worth,” and I asked the girls if they actually BELIEVED that statement, or if they often thought like I did and let the world’s list become their own list of ways in which they determine their worth.

I posted one of my favorite quotes by Brad Wilcox.

“Our transforming magic potion is in knowing we are God’s children. We did not come to earth to find self-worth. We brought it with us. When we know that, we have all the “magic” any of us needs to feel beautiful, courageous, and acceptable.”

Today when I taught this lesson, there was a moment when my voice shook and my eyes watered as I remembered a story about Easton that I had forgotten, and as I shared it with my young women there wasn’t a dry eye in that room. When Easton was 4, we were living with Jacob’s parents, and I remember he came home from Adam’s one day and walked right into the toy room to his dinosaur costume and asked for a pair of scissors so that he could cut up the costume. I asked him why he would ever want to do that, and he said, “Because that cool kid would never wear this. I want cooler clothes like him.” I asked Easton who he was talking about, and he gets down on the floor and starts spinning on his back trying to break dance, saying that the kid danced like that and sang and all the girls loved him. He had super cool hair and dressed really cool and even played basketball really well. After texting Adam, we determined it was Justin Beiber who had made an appearance on the Today show which Adam had had on in the morning. I laughed about Easton’s fascination with the kid, thinking it was funny that a 4-year-old with really pay that much attention to some pop star teenager on TV. A little while later I was upstairs in the boys’ room playing with them, and I look over at Easton who has tears streaming down his face, so I asked him, “Easton, why are you crying, honey? What’s the matter?” He then said to me, as sadly as I had ever heard him say anything, “I’m just not special. I can’t sing or dance like that. I’m not an awesome kid.”

When he said those things, and I watched the tears stream down his face and felt his own little sense of worthlessness at such a small age, my heart broke as I listened to my perfectly amazing little Easton tell me that he was not special, he was not awesome. And I could tell that he really felt that way, and I just hurt to watch him feel so bad about himself, especially because it was such a false idea that he was buying into. As his mother, I grabbed him into my arms, and I assured him that he was amazing and that I loved him and that Heavenly Father loved him and none of those other things mattered even one bit. All I could think of was that he needed to know who he was and what he meant to me and to everyone that mattered.

I knew right then that what I felt to hear my amazing child tell me that he was not special and that he couldn’t do anything amazing was exactly how Heavenly Father felt every single time I tore myself down with my “I’m too this” or “I’m not enough that.” And I could feel the foolishness of my ways, of all the bad thoughts I had believed about myself, and I knew that I had hurt Heavenly Father every time I said those awful things about myself. I am his daughter, his child that he loves far more than I could ever love Easton.

I had forgotten that story for a while and gone into complaining about myself and all my flaws again. When I shared it with my YW I knew that they understood that Heavenly Father doesn’t want us tearing ourselves down. He doesn’t want us conforming to the world’s idea of what it means to be worth something.

If you think about it, all of the people that we watch on TV and all of the people around us that do bad things are people who don’t understand that we brought our worth with us when we came to this earth. If they knew that, if we knew that, it would literally “transform” us into the people that Heavenly Father wants us to be.  The sad thing is that people in the world are truly looking for their self-worth, trying to find it in all of the things that the world says to them , “Hey, this is what will make you worth something.” And when we forget, when we let Satan slip those thoughts about ourselves into our minds, we start trying to find our worth instead of remembering that we brought it with us. And in trying to find our worth, we turn to the world and ask it, “What can I do to be worth something?” I fall back into this so easily when I think, “I will be worth it when I lose 20 lbs. I will be worth it when I get the baby weight off faster.”

We are children of divine worth, and that is a principle that we have to gain a testimony of and remember when  the world starts sending its lies our way. I concluded the lesson with my favorite children’s book, You Are Special by Max Lucado. I love that book and remember the day that I first heard it. In it, there are wooden people called Wemmicks who walk around all day giving each other star or dot stickers – stars for doing something good or praiseworthy, according to the world’s standards, and dots for doing something bad or not cool. Punchinello is a Wemmick who just can’t do anything right and who’s been given a lot of bad marks by the other Wemmicks. One day he meets a Wemmick who has no stars or dots because the stickers won’t stick to her. She tells Punchinello that it’s because every day she goes to see Eli the woodcarver, or their maker. So Punchinello goes to see him as well, where he learns that those marks he’s been given don’t matter, and that all that matters is what the maker thinks. Punchinello asks the maker why he matters to him, and Ely replies, “Because you are mine. That’s why you matter to me.” Such a good book with a beautiful message about letting God, and not the world, tell us what we are worth. Every day, we need to visit with the Lord, go to Him as Punchinello did in the story, and let HIM tell us what we are worth. Then all the stickers the world would give to us won’t stick because all that will matter is what He thinks. And He thinks we are pretty special.