Church Update

Youth from around the world asked Lindsey Stirling, a dancing, hip hop violinist and Youtube success story their questions, via Facebook, Instagram, and video Tuesday night in a live Face-to-Face encounter hosted by General Young Women’s Bonnie Oscarson and General Young Men’s President, David L. Beck.

They asked Lindsey, who has had 100 million views on her video “Crystallize” and is a returned missionary questions how she upheld standards in the entertainment business, how to achieve your goals in life—and most revealing, how you have a sense of self-worth when you always feel like you are failing.

Lindsey was candid both about the anorexia that once plagued her and the fears she has sometimes known with so many eyes upon her and how she gained confidence.

One teen asked, “If I’m a consistent failure how can I see that I have any worth at all?”

Lindsey answered that we are harder on ourselves than anybody else is. When she went on America’s Got Talent and made it to the semi-finals, she felt like an embarrsing failure. People said to her, “Lindsey, you made it to the quarter finals,” yet she still felt like she’d lost her only chance for a musical performance career.

She learned, “Worldly pursuits and acclaim and beauty will never make you happy.” She said that the need for achievement can be addictive, and you can never get enough. She said that one of her favorite movie quotes ever was from Cool Runnings about a Jamaican bobsled team whose coach had cheated in the Olympics years before to get a 5^th gold medal. When his team learned of this they said, “Coach, you had won four gold medals. Why would you cheat to get another one?” The movie quote, “A gold medal is a wonderful thing but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”

Lindsey said that at one point that she was skinny. She wasn’t doing well in school. “I’ve never hated myself so much,” she said. “I was trying to get happiness from everything else besides what is inside of me.”

Her eating disorder came because she had been trying to gain self-confidence and the only way she felt like she would be happy is if she were thin. She finally learned, however, “I don’t like my favorite people because they are skinny or fashionable or popular. Even if they have these things, it doesn’t matter.

She said that she began to retrain her brain to think positively the same way she practiced the violin or practiced dancing. She remembers his sister looking in the mirror once. She had no makeup, but she said, “Look at that face. That’s a great face.” Lindsey said she learned from that and whatever she looks like in the mirror she says the same thing to herself. “Look at that face. That’s a great face. It’s an expression of gratitude.”

She also said that attending her first award ceremonies was challenging. “There’s a lot of egos floating around, and it can be overwhelming,” she said. At her first award show, nobody wanted to talk to me on the red carpet and nobody wanted to interview me.” She said instead of feeling devastated, she learned “just to be grateful that I’m here.”

Lindsey created a song called “Shatter Me” to capture this feeling. It is about a ballerina in a snow globe who is porcelain and perfect. She wants to move. She wants to play. She wants to dance beyond the globe. Then she begins to crack and she sees these cracks in herself and becomes terrified. In the song, the ballerina’s perfect porcelain is cracked and underneath is the real ballerina. Lindsey said, “I had to break through what I thought of myself in order to be free.”

One of the most spiritual experiences of her life was when she was writing her second album. She was terrified because her first album had been such a big success and a huge audience was waiting for her second one. As she prayed about it she heard “almost an audible voice” say “I didn’t lead you this far to let you fall.”

“The next day, I was terrified again,” she said. That is why it is so important to write about these moments in our journals. When you feel the Spirit, she said, it is real. It is powerful. Read that journal entry when you need it. Trust in the Lord’s promises from the past. “He’s not going to forget you just because you don’t feel it right now.” 

If God is directing us, she said, he’s not just going to leave us alone when we get to a certain point. “Every time I go into the studio I say a prayer for myself and for my producer,” she said.

The best advice that she could give to an aspiring musician is to keep the Spirit with you and pray all the time. “The veil is a lot thinner than we think it is,” she said, “There are influences of good and evil all around us all the time. When se ask for help, Heavenly Father will always send help. I have relied on that when I’m nervous or when I’m feeling weak.”

She has also made a promise to herself and to God about what her standards will be even though she is in the entertainment world. She says there are clothes that look cool, trendy and fun that she won’t wear and admits, “It’s really hard to shop for modest clothes, especially formal wear,” but her whole management team is supportive of her standards. They don’t present clothes to her to wear that are immodest, because they say, Lindsey wouldn’t want it.”

“Living the gospel makes me happy,” she said. The whole group lives with Lindsey’s rules on tour. We have a dry tour with no alcohol. We don’t perform on Sundays. They try not to wear around me. “It’s been cool to see how the gospel envelops others.” People call her tour, the peaceful. “It’s a testimony to the standards of the Church,” she says.

You can see the Face to Face event here.

Here is Lindsey Stirling in her “Crystallize” video.