When the same message comes at me in the same week from vastly different sources, I’m learning to pay attention. Sometimes tender mercies come disguised as coincidences.

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in Relief Society in my parents’ ward—the first time I’d been to Relief Society in a very long time. (I’m the primary president). I was feeling generally worn down: truth be told, I didn’t especially want to be there.

As some of you may know, I wrote a book. It doesn’t come out until early next year, but already there is some pressure to be present on social media, to promote the book, to build a community of readers and writers. It’s wonderful and exciting (a dream nearly 30 years in the making!) and downright terrifying (strangers—worse, people who know me—are going to be able to read it and judge me, not just the book). And sometimes, truth be told, a little depressing. Because even after (nearly) reaching a goal I’ve worked toward for a very long time, some days it still feels like too little, too late. So many other writers I meet online seem smarter, funnier, younger, prettier.

Sometimes I feel like my whole life I’ve been chasing some elusive idea of enough: that I will be smart enough, talented enough, something enough to matter.

That week, I’d been reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, a gift from a good friend who thought I needed to read it. In the book, Brown describes our current culture as one of scarcity, that preaches two lies: one, “an ordinary life is a meaningless life” and two, “we’re never enough.” At its root, a culture of scarcity insists that if we are not extra-ordinary, we do not have worth. And so we spend our lives hunting for a constantly moving bar of achievement that will say now—now I’m enough. Now I am valuable.

It’s exhausting. And that Sunday, sitting at the back of a familiar room, I was exhausted.

Then the teacher got up, and began the lesson: President Hunter on “True Greatness.” I began to read the lesson to myself as the instructor talked, and by the time I read this, I was in tears:

“Many Latter-day Saints are happy and enjoying the opportunities life offers. Yet I am concerned that some among us are unhappy. Some of us feel that we are falling short of our expected ideals. I have particular concern for those who have lived righteously but think—because they haven’t achieved in the world or in the Church what others have achieved—that they have failed. Each of us desires to achieve a measure of greatness in this life. And why shouldn’t we? As someone once noted, there is within each of us a giant struggling with celestial homesickness. . . . The difficulty arises when inflated expectations of the world alter the definition of greatness.” (emphasis added).

Sound familiar? President Hunter suggests that “True greatness [comes from] the thousands of little deeds and tasks of service and sacrifice that constitute the giving, or losing, of one’s life for others and for the Lord.” In other words, the ordinary becomes extraordinary through sanctification.

As I sat listening, I was electrified by this epiphany. Not only is charity saving, it’s liberating: it lets us release envy and gets us out of the scarcity mindset, that there’s only so much value to go around. Charity reminds us that everyone has worth (including us). It lets us turn outward.

But I needed more than just the reminder of charity. I needed the reminder that I don’t have to do anything to be enough. I just am. Brené Brown suggests that the opposite of this culture of scarcity is wholeheartedness: believing in your intrinsic worth and telling yourself, “No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.” . . . “Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”

A few nights later, I reread Elder Uchtdorf’s talk from the April conference: “The sheep is worthy of divine rescue simply because it is loved by the Good Shepherd.”

We don’t have to earn God’s love—it just is. And we don’t have to earn our worth—we already have it.

We just need to remember that.

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