In this chapel‑style talk, Hillary Bagley, a 41‑year‑old Latter‑day Saint woman, shares a deeply personal story of feeling isolated despite being surrounded by a large congregation. She recounts a winter morning in church where she questioned her life’s direction, feeling she had strayed from a self‑crafted “blueprint” that equated a husband and children with a solid foundation. Through a pivotal moment of divine prompting—“what if you didn’t do anything wrong?”—she discovers three guiding principles that reshape her outlook: (1) Honesty, learning to see herself clearly and seek brutally truthful friendships; (2) Gratitude, recognizing that even perceived flaws are opportunities for growth; and (3) Self‑love, understanding that lasting change stems from loving oneself rather than self‑loathing. She illustrates these lessons with vivid metaphors (fun‑house mirrors) and a serendipitous anecdote of meeting her future husband while fundraising for the Children’s Miracle Network at Costco. The talk concludes that embracing honesty, gratitude, and love builds a resilient personal foundation, whether one’s life resembles a cottage or a mansion.
Chapters
All right, I asked Hillary a few people and she brought hers with her, so I'm going to read this off. Hillary, another student of ours, another graduate. Hillary Bagley is a wife and a bonus mom to 6 extraordinary people. She is passionate about helping others love every aspect of their lives through gratitude and honesty. We have a theme going on with gratitude here. She's learned that life is filled with opportunities for growth and learning. Because of this, she is eager to share what she has learned to help those around her avoid some of the same pitfalls that can derail us from reaching our full potential. Hillary provides her perspective with humor and compassion and love. Please help me welcome to the stage Hillary Bagley.
I said that I have humor and then I have to follow a comedian. She was so fantastic. So several months after I turned 41, hating myself, I was sitting in church on a Sunday morning. It was January or February. Cold, cold outside. I do not like Utah winters. I really, really would rather live just about anywhere else. You can ask my husband. He's from Arizona and doesn't love the heat. I don't know. It's weird. But I was sitting in church and there was probably several hundred people in the congregation, a large congregation, and I was sitting on a bench with my mom. Have you ever— have any of you had the experience of sitting in a large group of people yet you're entirely alone? I was alone. And I was— I was asking God a series of questions. Those questions were ones that I had honed over several years. So it wasn't the first time I was asking these questions. I was sitting in what felt like a cold room by myself with my head down and tears streaming down my face. And I asked, "What did I do wrong? Where?" I had learned to ask very specific questions even though I never really had ever felt like I got an answer. How could I have maybe stayed in one place? I had lived in another place for quite a long time and I thought, okay, should I have moved sooner? Should I have stayed there longer? I got so specific that I got to the point that I was asking, at any point, should I have turned right? Down a road that I should have turned left. And I know I just did that backwards, but hopefully it was right to you. I was asking very specifically because my life didn't resemble anything that I wanted it to look like. I needed to know from God, as a 41-year-old Latter-day Saint Mormon woman, how I had so offended him that I was not deserving of a husband. For me, there's a foundation. I want you to— who here has looked at a blueprint ever? You know what I'm talking about. You know what a blueprint is. So I think often, kind of along the lines of what Luke was talking about, you have this blueprint of your life, right? When you're a young person, you build Oftentimes, you know, your blueprint looks like a superhero or a ballerina. I had a blueprint for my life, and at this point, by the time I was 41, it looked very cottage-esque. It was not, it was not extraordinary. However, my biggest problem was that I had no foundation. No matter what you try to build If you don't have a foundation, it, it's never going to be what it could be. What I thought a foundation should look like was a husband and children. That's what my foundation was supposed to be. So there I was in the chapel, and I knew that I was just lost. 3 things have changed how I approached my life. Something specific happened that day. I realized that I had to learn how to be honest with myself. The first thing is honesty. I read on the internet recently that the truth will set you free. But first, it'll piss you off.
Right?
How many of you have ever had that experience where you find out something about yourself and you're like, "Ah! That's awful! I hate that!" So, yeah, that was really me. I think that I had gotten so used to seeing a reflection of myself. Who has ever seen— Do you know what a funhouse mirror is? Do you know what that is? At the carnival? So there's these big bubbly mirrors, right? And on one side you look like you have a 5-foot neck, and on the other side you look like one of the munchkins from The Wizard of Oz. So I had gotten so used to seeing my reflection in a funhouse mirror that I really believed that that was true. That was my truth. So the first thing I learned is that I had to, I had to ask different questions of God. I had to ask him how to see myself honestly. And the first thing he taught me is that I needed to find honest, good friends, people that I could trust. Not that we're going to be brutally honest just to be brutal, but to be truly honest with me. Point out the really great things about me and then also tell me the things that maybe aren't working so great for me. The second thing along the theme of today is gratitude. Doris Day, one of my most favorite people alive— well, I don't know if she's still alive— that ever lived, I should say. She said, gratitude is riches, complaint is poverty. The truth is, is there are people with not a cent in their bank account that are the richest people in life. I needed to choose to live in a way that showed that I was grateful for even the things in that mirror that needed changing. Because those opportunities give me a chance to learn and change and grow. The third thing, and this is the thing that I honestly think is the most important, and that is to truly love yourself and to truly love others. I have learned from personal experience that you can change a lot of things out of self-loathing. You can beat yourself at the gym and hate yourself and run and sweat. Rarely do those things actually last. If you don't change yourself because you like yourself, because you love yourself, those changes rarely last. Honesty, truly seeing your actual reflection, Gratitude— being grateful for the things that even that you have to change and loving every aspect of your life— that makes a solid foundation. That's a foundation you can be proud to build anything on, even if it's a small cottage, even if that's what you choose. You can choose a mansion or a cottage, but you have a foundation to build a life on. So join me again in the chapel that cold winter morning. With tears streaming down my face, I was asking God what I had done wrong. And a thought came to me that I promise I had never imagined before. Two words that said, what if, Hillary, what if you didn't do anything wrong? What if you are exactly where I want you to be, exactly at the time I want you to be there? That was nothing that I could beat myself up with. I was completely unfamiliar with that. What if? What if you didn't do anything wrong? Those two words changed the way I looked at my life. Those two words opened up my opportunity to find honesty, gratitude, and love. About a year and a half after this experience, I was standing on a stack of pallets at the front of Costco, and I often would sing to raise money for Children's Miracle Network. Little did I know that a good friend of mine had told a man that she knew, a single man that she knew, that I worked at Costco and that I liked to sing. The day that I was standing on those pallets begging through song for people to give money to Children's Miracle Network, my husband was checking out. And he came up to me and he said, "I think we have a mutual friend." And I thought, I'm going to marry you. It's sadly true. It really is true. The truth is, what if you didn't do anything wrong? Honesty, gratitude, and love can change the world.
