Once upon a time, she was on a softball team. She was no good, really, but she felt the need to be something great someday, and she thought that maybe this was the way to do it.
(it wasn’t, just in case you were wondering)
She was a sophomore in high school and was nowhere NEAR the JV or Varsity level, so she played on the Sophomore Team.
read: “…there are [good] teams and there are [bad] teams. Then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us.”
(slightly altered quote from Moneyball)
This wasn’t a team. This was a group of girls who only slightly got along with one another, each praying that Coach would see her inner Jennie Finch break free and dazzle the masses, guaranteeing a starting spot on the Varsity team in the very least. …you know, with as much dirt rubbed in it as possible.
She also didn’t have very high self-esteem. She was shy, she was awkward, she didn’t really have friends like the rest of them did. She had a few, but at that point, it was more along the lines of a group of already established friends who let her sit with them at lunch.
So to recap, she was basically a nobody who had nothing going for her. She was a nice girl, but by no means was she anyone’s first choice to sit next to in the dugout. Or second. Not even third. She probably had a better chance of getting placed at the bottom of the batting order than she did of having someone genuinely think she was interesting.
Then one day, they drove up to Lehi for a game. It was right after school, and her last class of the day had been seminary, so she had placed her scriptures in her bag with her softball gear. When they got to the field, she took her scriptures out to find her sunflower seeds that had mysteriously gone missing in the catacombs of her Nike bag. Beautiful Sydney saw the book.
“Your middle name is Lyn?” she asked.
(the girl’s full name was engraved on her scriptures)
“Yeah,” she answered.
“It’s pretty!” Sydney said.
I want you to know that this moment changed her life in a small, but profound way. The girl never really thought much of her middle name. After all, it was her uncle’s name. Even though her mother always reassures her that she was not named for her uncle, still, no girl wants an old man’s name for her own. But at that moment, when Sydney expressed her approval of the girl’s middle name, she started to like it. It became beautiful to her, too.
She started using it everywhere. She wrote it on her food when she got to college, she signed it on notes she sent to her friends, she included it in her username for her Instagram account, she put it everywhere. It was as though almost overnight, her middle name went from something she mostly disregarded to something that she genuinely liked, and even treasured.
Sometimes, in life, all we need is one person to genuinely believe we’re worth something. One person to believe we are truly beautiful. When all we feel like is just another rock kicked down to the base of a mountain, sometimes we just need one person to notice us, pick us up, and see that we’re actually a precious stone, far better than we could even believe of ourselves.
Sometimes, all a person needs is someone to see the worth they never thought they had, and then they’ll start to see it for themselves.
Be that person for someone else.
