FAIR's Rising Generation

Archive for September 5th, 2009

I’m making my introduction short since this post is much longer than I know it should be. Long story short, this is the second of three posts, the first being Let’s Put Some Meaning Into This Chant Part 1. If you haven’t read that, I suggest you do, but this one should still make sense if you choose not to.

Both posts focus on putting meaning back into the Young Women’s Theme. The last one focused on the first and last paragraphs, and this one focuses on the values. So here we go:

Faith

I could give you tons of good scriptures and quotes on faith, but what I want to do is feed you something you’re not already full of. Faith (in my opinion) is the very foundation of a good saint. What are charitable acts and fully paid tithes if you don’t believe in what you’re doing?

Faith is my personal foundation in the church–the thing that keeps me steady and gives me that fiery determination, steadfastness and fearlessness I’ve been known to display from time to time. Without it, I don’t know who I’d be. If I didn’t have faith that whatever happens is supposed to happen, I’d probably be afraid to cross the street. I always thought the constant loneliness that so many people my age complain about was just them being over-dramatic, but now I realize that if it weren’t for my faith, I’d probably be more lost than any of them. That is how important I think faith is.

Divine Nature

Let’s break this down. To be divine is to be God-like, and to have a certain nature is to have a certain character and to act a certain way. Considering that, to have a divine nature is to act in a way that is befitting of somebody who has the potential to become a God or Goddess–as all Children of God do. The amount of confidence and virtue that can be gained from knowing your potential is astounding. I’ve seen it change a Beehive with low self-esteem to a young woman who stands up straight, has a firm testimony in the Gospel, and who combats life’s trials with a flick of her wrist.

I think part of recognizing divine nature is realizing that everybody you interact with has the same potential as you. It’s your job to respect that and help others realize it too.

Individual Worth

It’s so hard to write about individual worth without sounding cheesy, but here I go… To me, individual worth is to follow the dictates of your own soul and not the norm set by society. What the Church is trying to do by putting it in the Personal Progress Program is help Young Women strive towards their own kind of beauty and not the beauty of the world. Take it from me. The YW in our ward are really tight. We love each other so much, and we’ve all given each other the chance to see that. Every single one of us is so amazing that, once we really got to know each other, it sometimes made us speechless.

Honestly, if you really got to know anybody while maintaining an open mind, you’d realize the individual worth each person has. The purpose of the Individual Worth value is to encourage us to act upon and embrace it instead of hide it.

Knowledge

This is probably the easiest value to wrap your head around, probably because it’s the most concrete. Everybody knows what knowledge is; heck, we spend 13+ years of our lives gaining the stuff in school. Knowledge is crucial to success of any kind in this world, and as long as you’re aiming for the right thing, it can be a major asset to your spirituality. Knowledge is valued more by some than by others, but there is no doubt that it should be valued by everybody to some degree. Raising a family, getting a job, having a calling in the church… all these things require knowledge, and I’d certainly hope that all of you hope to achieve and/or maintain at least one the those things.

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Those are my thoughts on the first four values and what they mean to me. Honestly, people, once you understand things like this, you really learn to appreciate them. Once you realize how important it is to have individual worth, you can’t help but to gain it.

I know that my words probably don’t mean as much to most people as they do to me; that’s why I encourage you to find your own–Not just with the Young Women’s Theme, but with other things like the Atonement or scripture study.

You’ll never be able to enjoy living the life of a Latter-day Saint if you don’t understand the importance behind the Church’s teachings. If you really know what you’re doing and why when you read your scriptures every night or go to church every Sunday, then without doubt it should make you one of the happiest people alive.

My third post on the Theme can be found here.