Who Are You?

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."  I'm here to take that a few steps further; to share with you some of the big A-Ha!s that Heavenly Father has give me these past few years.

A huge cornerstone to my stalwartocity (It's a word!  Okay, maybe it's not a word...) has come from the divine empowerment that has come, little by little, by a more perfect understanding of what faith truly is.  The capacity of the power of human faith is bottomless because it is powered by the infinity of Deity.  We read of truly power-full persons moving mountains by faith in a number of places (my favorite example can be found here).  We are promised that same power.

So why don't we draw upon it ourselves?

When it comes down to it, we give too much of our empowerment away to other people.  You are not the person someone else sees.  You were born imbued with power from on high.  Your job here is to learn how to access that limitless pool of power.

If you're going to see yourself through anyone else's eyes, make sure they belong to Deity.

True story:  the very first time I met with missionaries, they sang "I Am A Child of God" to me.  A cappella.  Off key.  Honestly, to a non-Mormon, the song can seem kind of...trite.  Needless to say, I got baptized anyway.  Then I read The Lectures on Faith.  And my world exploded.  If you have never read it (and I'm continually amazed that the vast majority of Mormons haven't!), do it.  Now.

If we really, really believed that we are children of God–heirs to Heavenly Parents–would we, could we, limit ourselves to the doldrums of an earthly reality?  Would we believe someone else when they didn't recognize us for what we are?  Would we give someone else the power to define us?

...Would your identity lay anywhere other than that rock solid knowledge of your own divinity?

There's this story about Napoleon.  (This may seem like a tangent, but it's not, I promise.)

Basically, it was practice at coronations for the Pope to crown the impending kings and queens in order to symbolize God's divine investiture in their reign.  Napoleon, however, took the crown from Pope Pius VII and crowned himself.  According to legend, Napoleon did this in order to show that he didn't need God's approval to be the emperor and that the power was in his hands alone to be an agent.

Listen.  I'm not asking you to be Napoleon.  Seriously.

I'm not asking you to become arrogant and self-important.  What I'm asking you to realize is that you have already been promised the crown.  You don't need to put it on your own head.  Just don't let anyone else convince you that the crown isn't yours in the first place.

I started here with a quote, and I'll end with one:*

They are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their own powers.  –Christian Bovee

*Can I just point out that the webpage that supplied both of my quotes also has one from Tyra Banks on an episode of America's Next Top Model...?  Yeah, that kind of shoots through its credibility.