Courtney Africa Choice

In the same Education Week talk  Hank Smith told a story about a student he had named Courtney.  Courtney was in his seminary class for three years.  Courtney would spend at least two hours every morning getting ready...hair, makeup, clothes.  She always looked perfect.  She was obsessed with looking just right.  With being the prettiest, best dressed, with competing and comparing.  A couple of years after she graduated from high school, Courtney came to visit him and said she was going to Africa.  He asked why and she said it would look good on her application for grad school.  So she packed up and went to Africa.  The flight was long and when she arrived, she was driven for a couple of hours to a town in Zambia.  Her home was tiny and not luxurious.  There was an outdoor toilet with only three walls.  The first night there she cried all night long.  She's not sure why other than she just needed to let stuff out.  But after 3 days she stopped worrying about her hair, makeup or clothes. Hank Smith said it took 20 years for the world to put all those cares and thoughts and comparisons inside her but only 3 days for the Lord to take them out of her.  She began to serve.  She learned how to give vaccines and she cared for orphans.   When it was time for her to come back to the US, several mothers begged her to take their children with her and give them a better life in the US.  She told Hank that she didn't change their lives, solve the poverty or limited medical facilities and it's likely they don't even remember she was there.  But it changed her life.  She said she was given a choice to choose the world or choose the Savior and she chose the Savior.  It changed her.  And she was happier than she had ever been before.

Lessons learned:  Change is possible.  And it can come quickly with the Lord's help.  (Though, of course, it doesn't always come quickly.)

The world wants us to compete and compare and we will never be enough.  The Lord wants us to improve and He will make us enough.

We all have a choice to choose the world or choose the Savior...we should choose the Savior.

Break up with the world.  If you're headed toward Christ, you will automatically move away from the world.  If you move toward the world, you are automatically moving further from Christ.  They are opposed to one another.

2 Nephi 2: 11 "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.  If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad..."