00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 108, "Spiritual Submission and Our Self Worth." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:23 

Alright, hello there, my friends, how are you today? I hope that you're just in a great place. "Great place" meaning that not everything is positive, but a great place in being able to work through whatever it is that you are being given to work through right now. Life just presents us with all kinds of challenges, positive and negative and good and bad and all sorts of circumstances, and it is our privilege to look at those, to figure out what our work is, and to move forward and to grow and develop. I hope that you are going through that process for yourself. 

01:04 

I know that I have been working really hard on being more aware of things and it has made a huge difference in where I'm at, in how I'm feeling about myself, in my sense of self-worth, in my sense of self-love, in just my overall satisfaction and fulfillment in life. I just feel like I'm in the best place of my life and I'm so grateful to be where I am, and the work that I do here is to hopefully help you get to the same place, help you find this place where, gosh darn it we are not perfect by any means, we make a lot of mistakes, we're figuring all of this out, but we are figuring all of this out, right? We're not just sitting back waiting for life to do its thing. We are proactive in our understanding, proactive in our growth, proactive in what we are choosing to create in our lives, this is the best place to be. And I hope that you are there. 

02:06 

If you want to get there and you're struggling, coaching is a brilliant way to help you do that. So, I mean, contact me there on my Facebook page, Tanya Hale LDS Life Coaching. There is a "book now" button where you can get on my calendar and set up an appointment and we can talk about coaching or you go to my website, tanyahale.com. 

02:28 

Alright, so that being said, today's topic is spiritual submission and our self-worth. Now you may not think that those really go together but I'm gonna show you how they do. So the past few months these two topics, submission and self-worth, have been swirling around in my brain and two days ago this last week they finally swirled together, which was pretty cool, and I was given some insight into how they are connected. I really just have felt like I need to share this with you. There's a piece here that I think for some of you is just gonna click and I'm excited. So my hope is that it will help you to understand better what it means to really be submissive to God, as well as give you more insight into what self-worth is, how important self worth is, and how great your self-worth is. 

03:30 

So let me just start you off. I started off the first leg of my journey these last few months exploring submission starting in April. Now this isn't the first time that I've looked into being submissive to God, but this latest round started about two and a half months ago while I was doing the Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon reading. I was reading King Benjamin's address to his people where he counsels them to put off the natural man and to be willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon the children of men. That's the scripture, not necessarily word for word, although I think it's pretty close. But I have been asking some personal questions of God about what it meant to be more humble in my thoughts and this verse really stood out to me as being part of the surrounding humility. 

04:23 

So I slowed down and I decided to take a closer look at what was going on with this verse, which is found in Mosiah chapter 3 verse 19. And the first part I looked at was the term "willing," which means "to accept by choice or without reluctance." I started to make connections with the idea of being all in, right? Accepting without reluctance, without putting up a fight,  without hesitation, and I started to ask if I really was willing when it comes to my relationship with God. Was I willing to be all in with God, be all in without reluctance, right, without any hesitation? And what would it require for me to accept without reluctance or hesitation or without a fight? What kind of relationship would I need to have with God? For me that meant I would have to have an awful lot of trust in God and His purposes if I were to be willing. 

05:23 

So continuing on in the willing to submit. So I looked up "to submit" and it means "to yield to authority, to subject to a condition, a treatment, or an operation." So that got me thinking to yield to authority, to recognize that someone may have more information or more knowledge than I have. So I will trust in their voice and in their desires for me. And when I look at this submission as a trust, I see it less as a groveling or a cowering or less-than, but rather a relationship wherein I can relax in the knowledge that the other person in this relationship is more qualified than me to make the best decision. It made me think about going in for a physical operation. 

06:15 

So short-term, the operation may be painful and difficult, but I also trust in the doctor's knowledge and experience to know that long-term this will be the best course of action to take. In relation to God, my relationship with Him is such that I trust that the experiences He gives me may be painful or difficult right now, but that long-term it will be better for me. So this reminds me that Drs. Cloud and Townsend who wrote the book "Boundaries," talk about things that cause us hurt and things that causes harm. So something may cause a short-term hurt, but long-term it doesn't cause us any harm. In fact, long-term we're in a better place. So, for example, when my daughter Allison fell in a soccer game and broke a bone, we took her straight to the doctor even though the next few hours of getting her taken care of would be painful for her, right? But even knowing this, we didn't just take her home and give her tons of ibuprofen and have her sleep it off, right? Even knowing that it was going to be painful to take her to the doctor, we took her because we knew that even though short-term it would cause hurt, long-term it would protect her from harm. Not getting the bone taken care of would ease the short-term hurt, but would cause long-term harm. If the bone doesn't heal correctly she may not be able to use that limb in the way that she would like to for the rest of her life right. 

07:50 

So when we're engaging in a process with Heavenly Father, we know that He will never cause us long-term harm. In fact, everything He does for us brings us greater joy and fulfillment in the long term. And sometimes we just have to be willing to go through the short-term hurt in order to reap the benefits of what he has in store for us. The last part of this scripture then was something that really intrigued me because I'd never paid too close of attention to it. It says that we need to be willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon the children of men. So inflict? Really? That word does not sound very comfortable, but what it means is to cause something unpleasant to be endured. 

08:40 

So to intentionally cause something to happen that will be unpleasant or that will cause short-term hurt. Is that really something that a loving parent would do to their child? Yep. It is. I did it with my daughter when she broke a bone. I've done it while teaching my children to work hard by doing chores or sticking with a project that they didn't want to finish. I do it with my students at school when I push them into unfamiliar territory in order to help strengthen and grow their brains. I even do it with myself when I know that I want to grow and progress in a certain area of my life. And at a basic level we understand that we often have to go through a difficult time in order to achieve what we want to in the future. 

09:25 

And I think it's so much easier when we can see the end goal and understand the benefits of what is to come once we've worked through the inflection. But so often what God chooses to inflict on us, we don't see where it's taking us. We don't understand why our child would leave the church or why a spouse would stray from our marriage or why we would develop an illness. When I sign up for a university, I at least know that after four to five years of struggle and difficulty and work, I will have a degree and the payoff is that then I can work in an industry where I will find satisfaction. But when I'm thrown into a life situation, when God chooses to inflict something upon me, I rarely see what I'm working towards. I don't see a degree or a well-paying job waiting for me at the end. 

10:14 

In fact, what I'm going through can seem to have no meaning at all sometimes. It can just feel like a pointless exercise in pain. But true submission to God means to really trust Him. To fully believe that even though we don't see the end, that the 

=end will be glorious. To know that we may experience short-term hurt, but God will never cause us long-term harm. We have  to completely trust that He has our best interest in mind and, in actuality, a better interest for us than we can imagine. A big part of this relationship of trust with God is recognizing and embracing the teaching that going through tough experiences and learning to respond with faith is actually part of The Plan of Salvation. This 50-50 that we've talked about before, or recognizing that life is on the positive half the time and on the negative half the time, is such a valuable part of God's plan because when we go through these ups and downs is when we really start to see where our personal work lies. It's during these times when we start to see how we respond and figure out why we respond the way that we do. Figuring out this "why" or identifying our thoughts is where we start to understand what our personal work is, where our weaknesses are, and where we need to grow. 

11:45 

So submission is not a cowering or a groveling or being less-than as we may first picture in our heads. Submission is a relationship of trust, fully believing that God has the intellect and the experience to know what is best for us, and trusting enough in His unconditional love to know that He will do everything He does for our greatest eternal outcome. Trusting that God knows us intimately, our strengths, our weaknesses, and therefore He also knows exactly what we need to grow and move into our deepest potential, that what He inflicts upon us is for our greatest good. And so we trust enough not to resist, but rather to accept without reluctance, without fighting, or without hesitation. So to reiterate, submission is not checking off boxes of what we've been doing every day, like reading the scriptures or praying or whatever. Submission is a relationship of trust between us and our Heavenly Father. 

12:53 

So as I worked through this over the last couple months, this was just such great information for me. It really fleshed out the idea of submission for me. And so I've pondered a lot about it over the past few months, and I've thought about how to create this relationship of trust with God more fully. And I've loved how my heart has softened more into a relationship of trust, rather than a role of obedient child, where I check off the boxes of what I've been doing. So that was huge for me. And then came my self-worth awareness. So about three weeks after my initial submission insight, so this was then in May, I had an experience with three of my children that brought some self-worth issues to my awareness. And as a side note, can I just say that I love learning to be more self-aware, as I'm learning how to be. It is so much work. It can be super hard to take full responsibility for what I'm creating, but it is also some of the most satisfying work I've ever done. It's brought me closer to God and Christ and I feel more fulfilled in my life than I ever have before. This work that I do with myself, that I do with you, that other coaches do with me, it's so insightful to help me grow and develop. 

14:23 

Okay, so that was a side note. So here's my self-worth "aha," and I mentioned this experience in a previous podcast, but while chatting one weekend with my three younger kids, we were talking about the difficulties of growing up in our home with a dysfunctional marriage going on. It was a very, very sweet experience and we were all very open and very vulnerable. During that time I took the opportunity to apologize to my children. I had realized that as I felt like such a failure as a wife, I unconsciously took on an unhealthy level of control over the house and my children. And part of that control was deciding that we were always going to be happy. If they weren't happy, something was wrong, so I stifled their opportunities and their ability to feel some healthy negative emotions. It's because I was uncomfortable with the negative emotions and I felt that I was doing something wrong as a mother if my children felt negative emotions. 

15:28 

So we were talking about this and I was apologizing. So obviously all of that issue is much more complicated, but as all four of us sat there chatting and crying, I mean we really were having a beautiful experience together. I was apologizing, I was asking for forgiveness, and these three children were freely granting that forgiveness. And during that time, my mind opened up to another scenario that had been playing out all of those years as well. And I just love how God gives us information line upon line as we're prepared to receive it. 

16:04 

So while I'm chatting with my kids, all of a sudden I clearly understood that when I felt like a failure as a wife, when I was struggling to embrace my own self-worth, that I turned to trying to do all the things that would make me a good mother and a homemaker. I started doing family prayer and scriptures and family home evening and I had my kids taking piano lessons so they could all play the hymns, right? I started cooking really great meals and always having laundry done. I made sure my house was mostly clean and that we showed up at church with everybody looking their best. And I fulfilled callings and did nice neighbor things. I sent out Christmas cards every year and I took around treats to the neighbors during the  holidays. Homemade, by the way. I had such an internal checklist of everything that I needed to do to prove my worth. 

16:57 

And while sitting on the sofa with my kids I realized that I had been trying to prove or even create my worth by all the things that I was doing. Somewhere in my brain I thought I would be more worthy or be worth more if I was good at all the things and if I did all the things. So I've never been someone who really connected with self-worth issues. I've always felt like like I was I was a good person right like I've never been one to really berate or to beat myself up too much. But in this experience I realized that I did have some self-worth issues that I hadn't recognized before. I was thinking that I could create self-worth by what I was doing. And I understood that even though I know in my heart, in my spirit, that my worth is set by God, that I can neither create nor destroy my worth, my brain was thinking otherwise. My brain was telling me that I had control over my worth by doing all the things. Fascinating, right? So I realized that I do have some self-worth issues after all, but it was such a beautiful realization for me and also a shocking realization because it went so against what I had always believed about myself, believing that I didn't really have self-worth issues. 

18:27 

Okay, so I'm going to clarify something. Is there anything wrong with doing all the things? All that list of stuff that I gave you and myriads more, is there anything wrong with doing all those things? Absolutely not, but my personal struggle here was in my reason for doing all the things. If I'm doing all of those things because I value them, because they are great self-care, because my love for God is great, then doing all the things is wonderful and it's even energy creating. But the reason I was doing all the things was to prove my worth to myself and to other people, or even thinking that I was creating my own worth. 

19:12 

What I failed to consciously understand all those years was that I do not have the power to create nor destroy my worth. Only God can do that. So just for fun, let's throw in a little pride as well, shall we? And an awareness of the pride, pride in thinking that I had the power to do God's job to create my worth. Whew, boy, I'm finding the more I do this, the more things I find I need to repent of as well, right? So I added pride to my list of things to repent of at night when I go to bed, but this was such a fascinating insight for me to realize that I had some work to do around my own self-worth. 

19:58 

So the last six weeks or so I've been really focused on looking at my thoughts around my own self-worth and my thoughts about other people's worth, and working to readjust those thoughts. I've really been concentrating on replacing the thought that I have control over my worth to knowing that God alone gave me my worth and that nothing I can do will create or destroy that worth. And we've talked about the process of changing out these thoughts before. The path in the forest, you remember that, right? So my old path was saying, I can create my worth by doing all the things. My new path is believing. My path is set. Nothing I do creates or destroy it. Right? 

20:43 

So I've been working on really just replacing those thoughts and doing that. And I've been doing a pretty good job. I'm feeling really good about the progress that I'm making. Of course, it's not something that happens overnight. It's a process of continually being aware of our thoughts. And so it's been a really terrific process for me these last few months, coming to understand these aspects of my life more clearly. 

21:09 

So I've described to this point how both of these topics, submission and self-worth, were swirling around in my brain. But it was like two separate tornadoes swirling around, right? Both of them picking up more energy, learning, picking up more ideas and getting bigger and bigger. Well, two days ago, I was back to looking at submission again with my scripture reading. And God helped me to understand how these two concepts came together. It's like these two tornadoes kind of started. They came together and they swirled into one. That's kind of how I'm envisioning it happening in my head. 

21:47 

So while reading again in the scriptures, I read another verse about submission and I realized that submission was a feeling and that I could put submission into the thought model in the feeling line. So if I want to feel more submission toward God, then I need to change my thoughts around submission and God. So I thought, "okay, well, if I want to feel submission, what thoughts do I need to think that will help me create submission?" 

22:18 

So I started making a list of thoughts that I could think that would cause me to feel submission. So here's some that I came up with. Now, I'm gonna put them down in the order that I wrote them down in my journal as I was processing this. So pay attention to the progression of the thoughts I wrote down and how they led me to realizing how submission is tied in with self-worth. So I started off with, "I trust God to do what is best." Okay? Thinking that's going to create submission, right? This relationship of trust. Next thought, "God will always take me to the best place. God loves me unconditionally and because of that I know I can trust Him. I can trust God without fear. God always has my back. God will lead me to my best self. God wants me to reach my greatest potential. I may not see where God is leading me, but I completely trust Him. God created me and I am of great worth. As a child of God, I truly have the potential to become as He is. God will lead me to my greatest potential. Embracing my worth is an act of submission." 

23:43 

I wrote that last line and I was dumbfounded. I just stopped. This is the writing process and how amazing and how valuable it is to get our thoughts down because when we do that, I had no idea in my head where that process of writing those thoughts down was going to take me, but it led me to the thought that said embracing my worth is an act of submission and it stopped me and I looked at that last thought. "Embracing my worth is an act of submission," and I just thought, "how is that?" 

24:25 

So I continued to kind of ponder it and I brought it up with a couple of friends. I brought it up with my daughter. It was just intriguing to me. I've always connected submission with being less-than, but here I was connecting submission with being of infinite worth. So I started to realize that true submission is an understanding of who God is as our Father and fully knowing that we are meant to be like He is, that we have spiritually inherited genetically all that He is and that we are capable of becoming as He is. 

25:15 

So we all grew up singing "I am a Child of God" to the point that it becomes a trite phrase that we can sing in our sleep. But for the first time I was starting to see for myself what that really means in relation to our self-worth. If I am truly created in God's image, if I am truly His daughter, then my worth is great and my potential is unlimited. God is unlimited. I can truly inherit all that God is. Notice I didn't say "I can inherit what God has, but "I can inherit all that God is." All of His attributes and His characteristics, all of His strength and power and understanding, this is where my worth lies. It lies in my submission of trusting that God has created me in His image, that I am His daughter, and that my worth is great because I am a piece of Him. 

26:30 

My relationship of trust with God, my submission, brings me to this place of embracing myself as His child, of knowing that my potential is limitless because of my relationship with Him. And it means that when God tells me that I am of great worth, that I am submissive and accepting of that truth. When I am truly submissive, I cannot deny my self-worth. When I fully embrace my self-worth, I am truly submissive. Submissive then doesn't become a less-than. It becomes a greater-than. I am greater than I ever imagined. I am greater than I can intellectually comprehend with my mortal mind. Truly embracing our self-worth is a spiritual process of submission, of a relationship of trust with our Father, knowing that as we submit to all things He sees to inflict upon us, that those things will bring about our greatest potential, that they will magnify our self worth in our own eyes. Because our self-worth is already in existence and it is already great, we just need to be submissive enough to see it and to embrace it. 

28:10 

I love, love growing up. I love the fact that our Father chooses to give us this information and chooses to help us to see. We truly develop our relationship with God when we embrace our self-worth. Take that and run, my friends. Growing up is amazing, hitting this place in life where these pieces come together, where we recognize our purpose in life, we recognize what we're doing here, why we're here, what we can accomplish...it's a beautiful process, beautiful process. I hope you are wading in until you're neck deep in this process, because it's amazing. Okay, thank you for joining me today. Loved sharing this with you. I just pray that it was of a benefit to you. It has rocked my world the last couple of days as I have made the connection between submission and self-worth, and I hope that it has definitely given you something to think about and to process and that it helps you to connect more with your own self-worth and helps you to embrace who you really are, what you are really worth, and helps you to develop a greater relationship of trust with your Father in Heaven. Alright, it's gonna do it for us today. Have a terrific, terrific day, and I'll talk to you next time, bye. 

29:58 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.