Posted by OrdainWomen on Apr 21, 2017 in Blog |

Debra Jenson serves as the chair of the Ordain Women communications committee.

It’s been just over four years since I wrote my Ordain Women profile. I see it as a love letter to the gospel and principles I believe in. See, when I came to the LDS Church as a teenager I was already a headstrong, militant feminist, and in this place, I found what felt like a home. I fell in love with the Young Women values of Individual Worth, Divine Nature, and Good Works. I believed that this gospel—that spoke of loving Heavenly Parents who knew me—was truly a place that saw me for what I knew I was: equal.

When I learned that I would never pass the sacrament or participate in a baptism because I was a woman, I felt in my bones that this inequality was not of God. I asked my questions and was told to pray. So I did. I prayed. And still, felt that this inequality was not of God. So I prayed some more. I prayed for 25 years and never doubted that my Heavenly Parents saw me as equal and that eventually my church would too. Well, in March of 2013, the next answer to those prayers came: Ordain Women.

I am proud of my profile. I am proud of the work I have done with Ordain Women. I believe we are acting as Zelophehad’s Daughters (Numbers 27) who saw an inequality, an unjust law that disenfranchised women, and asked the prophet to change that law. They went to the prophet with a specific solution and asked him to go to God. And he did. And the law changed. Because a few women spoke out.

So, now is the time for me to invite you… yes, YOU to write a profile. If you see this inequality in even one small way—the removal of women from blessing circles, the stagnation of young women as their male counterparts continue to advance in responsibility and service, or the absence of women from leadership—then I challenge you to submit a profile for Ordain Women and lend your voice to the chorus that asks the general authorities to go to God, seeking the ordination of women.