I am a daughter of Heavenly Parents who love me and I love them. I have been blessed with a loving husband and two beautiful children. I have been a member of the Church my entire life and am currently serving in the primary. I love education and I have a great career teaching high school science.
I remember the feelings I had growing up in the Church. I had a dream to be a doctor. At school, my teachers encouraged my dream. At home, my parents encouraged my dream. At Church, however, my dream was met with laughter. “What about your kids?”, people would ask. Or they would simply say, “You are a woman, your place is in the home.” While I certainly wanted to be a wife and mother, I was crushed that people assumed those things would disqualify me from my other dreams. I guess that was when I first started feeling like women were not treated equally in the Church.
I saw the heartache of the women around me: the mother who could not bless her sick child, the capable women who could not lead their struggling branches, the missionaries who could not baptize their investigators. I saw the voices of women silenced despite the good intentions of their male leaders. I saw the pain of women who did not fit into the mold dictated by the Church. I saw the sorrow of abuse victims whose male leaders simply didn’t see things from the same perspective of a woman. Despite those things, I also saw hope: the hope of women who knew their intrinsic value and divine worth.
Since then, I have spent a lot of time praying and studying about women in the Church. I read about women giving blessings in the early Church, about how the Relief Society was meant to be a “kingdom of priests”, and about the influential sisters like Deborah in the scriptures. I believe that Heavenly Father has great plans for His daughters. I believe that the Church will grow stronger once women’s voices are heard in the way they were always meant to be heard. I believe that Heavenly Father wants us to seek out the best spiritual gifts so that His work can be hastened. Most importantly, I believe that Heavenly Father loves and knows each of us individually and has heard the prayers of His daughters.
I believe women should be ordained.