229. Shine Your Light

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 229, Shine your Light.

This podcast is for people who know that living an extraordinary life is not easy or comfortable. It’s so much better than that. This is Better Than Happy, and I’m your host, Jody Moore.

Hey, everyone, how’s it going? Welcome to the podcast today. I am thrilled to be here speaking with you. I’ve got to let you know that this episode, Shine Your Light, is one that is going to be really good for teenagers to listen to.

It’s going to be good for everybody, but some of you were asking me, are there specific episodes that you recommend for teens? And the reason I say this is a good one is because I actually wrote this content specifically with young women in mind.

I was asked to speak at a Young Women’s in Excellence night in our stake and their theme was Shine Your Light. And as I was preparing for it, I thought, why not record this and put it on the podcast? I think a lot of people would like hearing this message.

So, we’re going to talk about shining your light. Before we do, I want to make sure that you know that, if you need the perfect Christmas gift for someone, someone who likes this podcast who you think could really benefit from going deeper in this work, then go to jodymoore.com/gift and grab them a 2020 Be Bold pass.

It will get them into the program, my online coaching program that I teach, for the entire year. And we will be going through a new course every month. The theme for 2020 is a life lived on purpose. And I’m in the process right now of finalizing all of that content. I’m getting ready to record all of the courses. My videographer’s coming to town and I’m super excited about what I’m going to be teaching next year.

So, grab that if you have somebody that you think might want to join us. They’re also going to get – in January, we’ll mail out to all of them the awesome little illustrated booklet full of wisdom and things that I teach, and that will just be a freebie that they’ll get for being in the program.

Okay, so let’s talk about shining your light. First of all, I love that the young women in the ward I was speaking at came up with this theme for their Young Women’s in Excellence night. Such a good theme.

Every human being on the planet was born with the light of Christ; every one of us. We know that because we got to come to Earth and get bodies because we chose to follow Christ’s plan. And I sort of think of this the same way I think about the sun.

The sun is always in the sky. It’s always shining every single day. The Earth rotates in such a way that the sun comes up for us, right? But on some days, it’s really obvious. On some days, we can feel the sunlight. We can see it. It’s really what we would call a sunny day.

And on other days, it’s less obvious because there are clouds in the sky and the clouds sort of hide the sun and it feels like the sun isn’t really out. But really, we know it is there, it’s just behind the clouds. And this is how I think about the light of Christ for all of us.

Again, we were all born with it. We all have it. it’s available to all of us in any given moment, but sometimes, we go through life and challenges come along and hard things happen to us or we make choices in our life that sort of invite clouds and it makes it harder to feel and experience that light of Christ.

And so what I want to offer today are three things that you can do to try to invite the light of Christ, to feel it first of all for yourself, but also to shine that light as an opportunity for other people to remember that feeling and that light that they also have within them.

The first thing that I want to offer is to stand for truth and righteousness even when others around you don’t, especially when others around you don’t. So, I went to Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington. And you might find this hard to believe, but I was not very cool in high school. I was not one of the popular kids.

And I kind of wanted to be. I looked at those kids and it seemed like it would be really fun to be popular and cool and accepted and included. But I didn’t want that enough to stop living the values that I had and the way that I’d been taught to live.

And the truth is, the popular kids in my school were making some choices that weren’t really aligned with the things that I’d been taught. I was not drinking alcohol and they were sort of all – or seems like all of them – experimenting with alcohol, even with drugs and cigarettes and things like that. And that sort of went against what I believed.

I wasn’t sleeping with my boyfriend. I wasn’t experimenting with the things that kids my age were, and at least in my mind, it sort of prevented me from being part of the cool crowd.

But here’s what’s interesting; in my high school we had what we called homeroom. It was this 15 to 20-minute class period in between first and second hour and you had the same homeroom all four years of high school. So you were with the same kids and the same teacher your freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year.

And so it was kind of a fun little 15-20 minutes. The announcements took all of maybe five minutes, and then we kind of just sat around and chatted until it was time to go to the next class. And so one day, either my junior or senior year, I can’t remember, but a little bit later into high school, one of my friends came to me in second hour and she said, “Some boys in my homeroom were talking about you.”

And I got kind of nervous and was like, “Oh, what were they saying?” And she said, “Well, first of all, these are the boys that it was…” and she named them. And they were the popular boys. They were the cool boys. So I was even more nervous about what they were saying.

And she said, “No, no it was really cool actually. They said Jody Lyman…” That’s my maiden name, “Jody is not the kind of girl that you want to date, but she’s the kind of girl that you want to marry.” So, listen to me, kids, I’m telling you, I know you feel like you’re not accepted and you’re not cool and you’re not doing the things the other kids are doing and it kind of seems like fun and you kind of want to experiment. But you know what? Secretly, some of them are thinking, “That’s the kind of person I want to marry one day.”

I also work with a lot of other coaches and I see coaches who are helping people with all different kinds of problems. And one of the things that many of the coaches I work with are helping people with is to stop drinking. These are adults who don’t necessarily identify as alcoholics but they started drinking alcohol at some point, a lot of them in high school or college, and now their brains are wired for alcohol.

And I hear their struggles. I hear them talk about how they can’t imagine life without drinking, they can’t imagine going out with a group of friends and not having a glass of wine. And they can’t imagine how they could ever enjoy themselves in a social setting without alcohol.

And it just makes me so grateful that I never got my brain to that condition.  I’ve done that in other areas, so I can relate to it in a certain way. But I’m telling you, these things that we’re taught and the values that you’re living, the choices that you’re making will pay off for you one day in some way.

And I’m pretty out of touch. I don’t know what kids are doing today, but I do know what it’s like to want to fit in and to want to be accepted and to want to be cool. And I also know that this period of your life, that sort of feels like everything.

It feels like it’s hard to see past high school. It’s hard to see past Friday night even, right? But this really is just a fleeting moment. Stand for truth and righteousness. This is one way that you shine your light.

The second thing that I want to recommend that you do is you be the youest you that you can be. Now, this is difficult to do. It’s difficult to know who we even are because, thanks to technology today, we all have access to see into each other’s lives, not only people that you go to school with and people that you live near and that are in your ward, but people all over the world.

We have such high visibility to one another, which is pretty cool. But one of the things that does is it sort of starts turning into all of us looking the same and talking the same and wearing the same clothes and the same hairstyles and the same hobbies and sort of living the same lives.

And this innate desire that we have as human beings to fit in is something that Satan wants to use against you. He wants you to feel bad or to be ashamed for those areas of you and your personality and your appearance and everything else about you that is slightly different than everyone else because you’re not the same. You are different in some way. And it feels like that’s a problem. And what I want you to know is that that’s not a problem. That’s the best news ever.

I have some quotes here from some people that you might know. So first of all, Justin Timberlake. I’m a big JT fan myself. So, Justin Timberlake said this recently.

He said, “Growing up in school, nobody ever called me anything close to an innovator. They called me different. They called me weird. They called me a couple other words I can’t repeat. Thankfully, my mother taught me that being different was a good thing, that being different meant that you could actually make a difference. If you’re a young person and you’re being called weird or different, or whatever you’re being called, I’m here to tell you that your critics do not count. Their words will fade; you won’t.”

I also shared, with the young women at this night, about Cindy Crawford. So, many of them don’t know Cindy Crawford because they’re too young. So let me let those of you who are young know that Cindy Crawford is possibly the most successful supermodel of all time.

And when I was growing up, she was very well known. She’s still completely gorgeous to this day. And Cindy Crawford is pretty well-known for the mole that she has on the left side of her face. And it’s a very distinguishable mark. It makes her very recognizable.

When she was growing up, kids teased her about this mole and she desperately wanted to get it removed. Even her sister called it her ugly mark. But her mother convinced her not to. And later on, that mole is now called her beauty mark and it went on to make her, like I said, distinguishable, to make a lot of women be able to relate to her because she had some unique characteristic about her and she’s so beautiful.

I also have a quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger who said, “When I first started out, my agent complained about my accent. He said nobody ever became a star with an accent like that, especially not with a German accent. I can imagine your name, Arnold Schwarzenschnitzen or whatever your name is on a billboard, yeah, that’s going to sell a lot of tickets, yeah right.”

So Arnold goes on to say, “So this was the negative attitude they had, but I didn’t listen to them. So then, when I did Terminator, “I’ll be back” became one of the most famous lines in movie history, all because of my crazy accent. Now, think about it. The things that the agent said would be a detriment and make it impossible for me to get a job, all of a sudden became an asset for me.”

So, I chose to talk about those people because they’re famous and we pretty much know them. But this is true of anybody that you look up to. I want you to think about the people that you respect, the people that you admire, the people that you aim to be like. They have something about them that makes them unique because, if they didn’t, we wouldn’t really notice them. We wouldn’t really look to them in this way.

I want to also share that when I first became a mother, I felt really bad about how much I liked working. I had a fulltime job and my first two kids were pretty close together, 15 months apart. So they were little. I was working fulltime in a corporate job, and I really enjoyed it.

I liked dressing up in nice clothes. I was good at my job. People would tell me that I was good at it, which was nice. I liked learning new things. I liked getting a paycheck. And I felt really bad about this.

I thought that if I was more righteous, I would want to be at home with my babies. And once I finally decided to embrace that I liked learning, I like teaching, I like working, and I was willing to do whatever Heavenly Father wanted me to do, then I discovered that I could do both.

I work from home now. I have my own business. And the thing is, that’s challenging to do. For me, it’s actually a lot harder than going to work for someone else. But it’s also amazing because I get to choose what hours I’m going to work.

If I really want a day off, I could give myself a day off. It requires a lot of me. I have to figure a lot of things out. I have to make sure the company’s achieving its goals. But all of those things I learned in my corporate days actually help me so much now to make this work.

And I believe that Heavenly Father wants me to embrace my strengths. He wants me to be the Jodyest Jody I can be and he wants me to use those strengths to do good in the world. And do you know what? He wants the same for you. Be the youest you that you can be.

Alright, the third thing I want to offer you to help you shine your light is to lift one another up. We have to be looking out for each other as human beings living on the planet. We do so much better when we look out for each other. So, look out for your friends, but look out for anybody that you know, through school or your sports or wherever you’re spending your time because we need to support one another.

I love how, in our church, we call each other sister and brother. And when I was growing up, I remember thinking that was kind of weird. My older brother would always ask me, is this a sister or a missus? Like, he couldn’t keep straight the adults in our lives.

But today, I love that we call each other that name. And being a woman, of course, I love being a sister and I love calling the other women that I know sister.

Some of you might be familiar with the author Glennon Melton, but she shared this in a blog post a couple years ago.  She was on tour signing copies of her book in book stores and this is what she described happened.

She said that two women came to her table last month at a book signing. One was named Xi and the other was named Mary. And Xi gestured towards Mary and then said, “This is Mary. Mary is my ex-husband’s girlfriend. We came here together tonight because we need to tell you a story. It’s a short story, but a good one.

This woman is dating my ex-husband and she has decided to love my son. She doesn’t have to, but she chooses to. She loves him well with her whole heart. I have never known how to thank her for making that decision, for deciding to love my son so well. I just wanted you to know that your book is what I finally gave her to say thank you. Thank you, Mary, for loving my son.”

And Glennon goes on to describe how she stared at them, they both had tears brimming, and she hugged them, and they cried because they knew this is love. What we have here is love.

And then she goes on to explain that, in carpentry, there is a term called sistering. Did you guys know this? I did not know this. So here’s how it works. A carpenter takes boards and lays them parallel to one another, and they’re designed to handle a certain load.

It might be that it’s going to be flooring put on top of those boards. It might go in the ceiling. It might go somewhere else in a building. But those boards are called a joist. Each board, I should say, is called a joist.

And sometimes, what happens is that that existing joist becomes weakened. Maybe it’s damaged by water or fire or maybe they’re just going to put a heavier load on it than it was originally designed to hold. But either way, now it’s not as sturdy as it needs to be.

And so when a builder needs to strengthen a joist, what they will do is put a board right next to the original one and fasten it together. And then sometimes they’ll put one on the other side as well and fasten them both together to hold up that existing joist. And do you know what it’s called when they do that? A sister joist.

That’s right, my friends, two boards supporting a weaker board on either side is a sister joist. And builders use that word sister like a verb. They say, “We need to sister the joists in the east bay,” or they say, “Are we finished sistering the roof rafters yet?” Such an appropriate verb, right, because this is what we do.

We lift one another up. When someone around us has a load that’s too heavy to bear on their own or life becomes too challenging and it breaks in some way then we stand on either side of that person and we sister them. And this is what shining your light means.

This is what Mary and Xi were doing with Xi’s son. They were sistering him. And they could have decided to hate one another because of the whole mess that occurs when a marriage ends and a new relationship begins. They could have been mad and jealous and threatened by one another.

Xi could have felt threatened that Mary’s son was going to like Mary better than her, that there was going to be, in some way, less love for her. But she knows that’s ridiculous. There’s not less love for her. There’s just more love for her son.

And this is the opportunity that we have, by being alive on the planet. This is shining the light of Christ. So please be willing to shine your light. It’s not always easy to do. But I also want anybody listening to this, especially youth, to know that Heavenly Father loves you and he knows you. He knows of your challenges. He knows of your struggles. And he is there and he will offer you support through others as well if you turn to him.

Thanks for joining me today, you guys. I hope that you will shine your light and I will see you next week on another episode. Take care.

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