I grew up in a small pond, a rural town in Idaho. I loved growing up there, loved knowing pretty much everyone in town. I did well in school, participated in extracurricular activities, and was generally well-liked by my peers.
But when I moved to Provo to attend Brigham Young University, I felt surrounded by a sea of flawlessly beautiful, smart, talented, confident people. I obsessively compared myself to women in my ward, women in my classes, women walking past me on campus. Each deficit I perceived about myself was like a rock dropped in my backpack. The heavier it became, the slower I ran. There was no way I could catch up with perfection, and yet I felt compelled to try—and punished myself for failing.
The temple was one of the few places I found relief, where I could take off my rock-filled knapsack and just focus on the work and the worship.
One day during my sophomore year at BYU, I went to the temple to do confirmations. Sitting in the small room wearing my white clothes, I took in the architecture—the layers of ornate crown moulding, the three-tiered glass chandelier, the floral design carved into the white carpet, the swirls in the arms of the upholstered chairs. Not a speck of dust, nothing out of place. I wasn’t out of place. It wasn’t perfection, demanding and oppressive, that I felt in the temple. It was wholeness.
When I took my turn sitting in the center chair, the ordinance workers put their hands on my head and performed the confirmations. When they were finished, I shook their hands and started to leave the room.
“Wait, come back here.” I turned around. It was one of the workers, an elderly man. “Let me feel that hand.”
Surprised but intrigued, I walked back and held out my hand. He began rubbing and squeezing it with his wrinkled, papery fingers. After a few moments, still holding my hand, he looked into my eyes.
“Inside you is strength and warmth and music.”
Silence hung in the air for a moment. What could I say?
“You might be right,” I said, not wanting to offend him but too embarrassed to agree.
“I am right,” he insisted, not missing a beat, not cracking even the slightest grin.
“Well, thank you,” I said shyly.
He let go of my hand, and I left.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. Why did he take my hand? And his words—strength and warmth and music. Were they really all inside me? How could he know?
Over the next days I found myself staring my self-doubt and self-criticism squarely in the face. It wasn’t just this man who saw things in me that I didn’t see. I wasn’t deprived of encouragement from my parents and teachers and friends. In fact, I was probably spoiled by it. But this comment from a stranger got me thinking.
I came to believe that Heavenly Father was speaking to me through him, the message something like this: “I need you. I have important work for you, so please stop tip-toeing around your life and start living it. Stop doubting that you’re enough. Stop believing that you are the exception to my love. Inside you is strength and warmth and music and so much more. I know because I put it there. And I want you to start letting it out.”
It hasn’t been easy, loosening the sinews around my heart and removing the labels and misconceptions that live there. But when I do—when I am strong for someone who needs to be weak, when I smile and speak gently and disarm apprehension, when I bring music to people who have lost their memories and sing my babies to sleep—I am my true self, and the lying voice is silent.
The adversary wants me to become the enemy of my own soul, to tear myself down and do his work for him. But he is not the one I serve. His work has no place in my soul. I am the daughter of a king, “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
And still in the making.
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