“Service with a Sparkle,” New Era, December 2015, 34–35
Service with a Sparkle
Karee Brown lives in Utah, USA.
One young woman learned more about divine nature by embracing her inner princess.
Typography by Danielle Evans; Photographs by Liang Zhang/iStock/Thinkstock and courtesy of Katelyn B.
Do you wish you could fly like a super hero and save the world, but you’re afraid of heights? Maybe you dream about sailing around the world in a boat, but you’re afraid of deep water. You probably have many righteous desires and goals. Do you ever feel like your fears stop you from sailing off to great heights?
Katelyn B., 16, from Missouri, USA, was working on her Personal Progress when she noticed some of the projects she had set felt a little too easy to accomplish. So she decided she needed to challenge herself to do something greater and perhaps a little more meaningful. Little did she know she would also have to face one of her fears: speaking in public. Maybe not such a scary thing for some people, but for Katelyn it certainly was.
Reaching Out
As Katelyn thought about setting a Personal Progress project goal for divine nature, she thought a lot about creating a project that could take her out of her comfort zone and really push her. She asked her leaders for ideas and one suggested visiting little girls in hospitals. Katelyn initially wanted to forget the idea. What would she even say to them?
But as Katelyn tried to think of a different project, her mind kept going back to those little girls. They are daughters of God like me, she thought. Maybe I could help some of them. She still felt the fear, but realizing she couldn’t push the feeling off any further, she got to work planning. Just a couple months later she began dressing up like a princess on her way to uplift and inspire the girls she visits in the hospital.
“Going to the hospital for the first time was one of the hardest things I have done,” Katelyn says. “It’s hard for me to talk to people I don’t know. But after the little girls saw me and began smiling, I felt peace. I knew it was what I needed to be doing.”
The glitter from Katelyn’s dress caught the little girls’ attention as she walked into the hospital rooms. This unexpected visit from a princess brightened their day. “They need to know they are important too,” she recounts.
Her goal was to help them smile as they engaged in fun activities and to encourage them to keep going.
“You really are a princess, whether you think you look like a princess or not,” says Katelyn. With a new perspective on divine nature, Katelyn learned to see these girls as daughters of God with great potential.
Finding Her Worth
That was a lesson for Katelyn. She had had difficulty seeing this kind of potential in herself. As a Beehive, she looked up to the other young women, but she didn’t feel like she had anything to contribute to her Beehive class. At school she felt pressure to try to be popular and fit in. “It’s hard when other people try to tell me what I am supposed to look like, act like, and do well at.”
One night for Mutual each young woman received a piece of paper with a name on it. The paper was passed around the room and each young woman wrote talents, abilities, or admirable traits about the young woman whose name was on the paper. As Katelyn read the kind words that the other Beehives wrote about her, she realized that the other girls saw talents and gifts that she had never seen in herself. That experience, coupled with her efforts visiting the hospital, “have taught me a lot about my role here.”
Fulfilling Her Divine Role
Now Katelyn is trying to find more ways to fulfill her role by using her talents to serve, lift, and bless others. She feels like the more she does now, the better prepared she will be as a wife, mother, leader, and in her future career. Katelyn’s princess project not only gave her an opportunity to help others feel loved and valued, but it also gave an opportunity to grow. As she focused more on lifting others and less on herself, she became more confident in her own worth.
Katelyn is no superhero flying across the sky. She hasn’t done anything to break world records. But visiting her little princesses in hospitals has helped her overcome her fear and realize her true worth as a daughter of God.