Your Infinite Worth
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland said:
“I plead with you young women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. .. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said: ‘You can’t live your life worrying that the world is staring at you. When you let people’s opinions make you self-conscious you give away your power. … The key to feeling confident is to always listen to your inner self—the real you.’ And in the kingdom of God, the real you is ‘more precious than rubies.’ Every young woman is a child of destiny and every adult woman a powerful force for good. I mention adult women because, sisters, you are our greatest examples and resource for these young women. …In too many cases too much is being done to the human body to meet just such a fictional (to say nothing of superficial) standard. As one Hollywood actress is reported to have said recently: ‘We’ve become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth. … I’m really saddened by the way women mutilate themselves in search of that.’
“In terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women, face in the modern world. And if adults are preoccupied with appearance—tucking and nipping and implanting and remodeling everything that can be remodeled—those pressures and anxieties will certainly seep through to children. At some point the problem becomes what the Book of Mormon called ‘vain imaginations.’ … Yet at the end of the day there would still be those ‘in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers’ as Lehi saw, because however much one tries in the world of glamour and fashion, it will never be glamorous enough.” (Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, from his talk entitled “To Young Women”. Italics and bold added for emphasis.)
