Humility, Courage, Forgiveness, Sacrifice

From his talk in the last General Conference, "To Be A Follower of Christ", Elder Alfred Kyungu invites us to imitate four qualities of Christ: humility, courage, forgiveness and sacrifice. Humility means letting go of our pride. It means acknowledging that there's a lot about our lives and the world around us that we don't understand, and that if we want to make the best decisions, then we must submit our will to He who does have a perfect understanding. Courage means letting go of our fear. It means having the faith to go forward into the unknown and trusting that when we are not strong enough, God will bear us up. Forgiveness means letting go of anger, anger at those who hurt us, anger at God for allowing bad things to happen to us, anger at ourselves for making bad choices. Sacrifice means letting go of our selves, our time, our talents, our energy, in short everything that we are. Each of these virtues on their own is not enough. They all work together. Having the humility to admit that we don't understand is useless if we don't have the courage to go out into that unknown, and that courage is useless if we don't forgive ourselves and others when our humility and our courage fail us, and forgiveness is useless unless we are willing to sacrifice ourselves in the service of others. It's like with light. To create white light, you have to have all the colors shining at the same time. If any of the colors are missing, then the light won't be pure white. We need to embrace and adopt and develop all of Christ's virtues, but the beautiful thing is that as we develop and strengthen one, since they are all so tightly interrelated, our progress ripples through all of the other virtues and they all strengthen and enrich each other.