FAIR's Rising Generation

Archive for July 7th, 2009

As an LDS youth I am constantly being encouraged to be different from the world around me, to have higher standards, to be nicer, to value my education more, etc… This is something that all LDS youth are being pressured to do, as are adults. This is a major factor in all religion; to be a better person. It is even more fundamental in our church as it leads to being worthy to enter the temple and to encourage others (members and non-members) to become worthy as well. Recently a thought came to me. How do I do it? How do I hold fast to the standards of the church? How am I always striving to be a better person? I answer this question with another question.

I ask myself ‘who do I want to be?’. This question comes into my head every time I’m making a decision. To answer I picture myself as best I can if I took either path. For example, if I were deciding whether or not to put a song on my iPod which (for whatever reason) I know shouldn’t be on there, I imagine what would happen if one of my friends was scrolling through my songs and saw it. They’d probably turn to me and say something like “You have this song? Holy crap I thought you were Mormon!”. I imagine the sick feeling and the guilt following that incident, knowing that I’d loose a lot of the respect for my standards that I’d built with my friends. I hate the idea of not being a good example for the people around me. As an LDS youth I realize that I want to be the person who only has appropriate music on my iPod, thus answering the question ‘who do I want to be?’. I want to be the girl who only dresses modestly, who never swears, who’s always smiling, who’s continuously forgiving and who (overall) is a good person.

We should all ask ourselves who we want to be. This is the ultimate question and should be answered truthfully. Once you realize who you want to be and never forget, inevitably you will become that person. If you hold fast to the vision of being who you want to be, it will take a great amount of force to make you become otherwise. So I urge you, in whatever way you wish, to ask yourself who you want to be, find the answer and continue to strive to be that person.

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FRG needs more writers, regardless of age, who are interested in writing a guest post for us, so if you have a message to share you may submit a sample of your words to us via our web form at http://youth.fairlds.org/contact.php.  Chances are good that we’ll like what you have to say and set you up as a guest blogger on our site.