From Kathy K. Clayton’s book ‘Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness”: Under the title:
A Sense of Our Spiritual Self Helps Us Embrace Our Divine Birthright
. . . . Without taking undue liberty, we might. . . suggest that the best, meaning the finest quality friends, music, thoughts, and behaviors—is none too good for those who know and remember that they are children of divinity. Young people who know and trust their divine nature are more likely to feel eligible, even obligated, to shun common-denominator associations or pastimes and claim more praiseworthy ones.
Worthy reminders of our divine nature can be offered by all kinds of unofficial teachers in all kinds of circumstances. A faithful young mother when, confronted with an invitation to join with some women who were banding together an identity group with which the young mom felt uncomfortable, turned to her brother for perspective. He responded to her confusion by saying, “Figure out what your personal mission is—your role in the divine plan. Then seize that mission with fervor and faith. The Lord knows you and loves you and has a plan for you that is specific, unique, and individual.” Reminders of divine identity from every loving source are so helpful.
What We Do Influences and Informs Our Identity
While working toward a master’s degree in education, I enrolled in a course entitled Cultural Identity. Among the provocative activities we completed during that course was one that asked class members to fill in a questionnaire. The worksheet included a list of nine personal characteristics or identities: race, gender, age, health, income, marital status, family, profession, and religion. We were instructed to number the categories in order of their significance as our identifying personal characteristics. Number one would be the category that we felt most profoundly identified who we were and how we saw ourselves.
As the only member of the Church in that class, I was the single person who selected religion as her number one source of identity. The youngest and oldest people in the class selected age as their number one, and those who were struggling with medical problems selected health. Others who felt either perpetually behind financially or had the good fortune of extraordinarily strong financial resources were prone to select income as their strongest identity piece. My number two was family. I had seven children all still at home and my commitment to that responsibility was both deep and demanding. Others who were spending consuming quantities of time on single pursuits likewise assigned low numbers to those categories.
The Cultural Identity class concluded that those things which we are most profoundly committed to and spend the most time attending to become our strongest sources of identity. If those sources are positive and validating, they feed our self-confidence and inform decisions that promote an integrated, worthwhile life. ~Kathy K. Clayton: Teaching to Build Faith and Faithfulness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012). 35-37 continued
