You Are Good Enough

This world is hard. There are so many things coming at us. We’re always being told how to live and who to be. It's so hard to find our place. It's hard to remember to love ourselves, or learn to love ourselves. You are not perfect, I know. None of us are. We were not sent to this earth to be perfect. We were sent here to improve ourselves daily. I know exactly how it is to not feel good enough. I have all of these hard classes and a whole new school and city to get to know. I have new friendships to make and people to meet. I sometimes feel like I am not enough for these people or that I am not good enough to survive college and my harder classes there. Then on top of that, I am trying to do mission prep. Somedays I fail to pray in the morning or at night when I get home late or I’m working on homework in the wee hours of the night. There are days when I don’t read the Book of Mormon. Somedays I just am not feeling spiritual or like I want to go to church. As I have been preparing for my mission I have been struggling a lot more with not feeling good enough. I am about to be a huge tool in the Lord’s hand for a year and a half. I am dedicating an entire year and a half to nothing but the Lord. That is a really scary thing to be preparing for. I feel like I do not know enough about the gospel, or that I have sinned too much, or I do not live the gospel well enough. I never feel like I am a good enough Latter Day Saint to be able to be a good enough missionary. Throughout this journey though I have learned time and time again this principle of being good enough. I read the talk “You Know Enough” by Elder Neil L. Andersen. This helped me so so much. In his talk, Elder Andersen shares a story where just like me he struggled to feel good enough to serve a mission. He shares an experience where he prayed about this and was told: “You don’t know everything, but you know enough!” Just like Elder Andersen, I do not know everything but I have also gotten the reassurance that I am enough. I know enough to keep striving to be better. I know enough to know if I keep praying and reading my scriptures and going to my church meetings that I will be blessed. I know enough about a mission that no one can ever be 100% ready for one. Every day we can strive to be a little bit better knowing we will never be perfect. Maybe one day we try to forgive someone who hurt us. Maybe the next we try to be more patient with our families. The next day you focus on not criticizing yourself. It can be small things every day. We will make mistakes. That is natural. God made us flawed. Just remember you can pick yourself up and try again. None of us are alone. We all have friends and family who love us. Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are always there for us. They know us perfectly, even better than we know ourselves. We can always go to them and they will always help us. We are enough. We are strong and beautiful. None of us will ever be perfect but perfection is not asked of us in this life. All that is asked of us is that we are trying our best, Christ’s atonement will make up for the rest. We are not alone in this life. The only person in this life you should ever be in competition with is yourself. As long as we feel good about ourselves and our choices we are good enough. Being weak does not make us less than worthy. In fact, it gives us strength, we are taught in Ether 12:27 that the Lord shows us weakness so that he can “make weak things become

strong unto us.”

The Lord gives us weaknesses so that we can become stronger. Not only are we good enough despite our weaknesses, but our weaknesses actually make us better. I love Al Fox Calaway and she has a quote that says, “You really are good enough, pretty enough and strong enough.” What she means by that is no matter what the world says or how we feel about ourselves at times we are always enough. I want you to look in the mirror every single day and say "I love me. I am beautiful and strong and good enough," because you ARE good enough. I know at times we feel we are not good enough for a boy/girl, or for our friends, or the popular kids, or our family, parents, or even for ourselves. But you ARE good enough. The Lord knows it and you should know it.