Is a virtue

I tend to pick a topic and go off on it for a while, convinced that I’m right and the rest of the world is wrong. (I’m actually right a lot of the time too, which doesn’t help my humility any really.)

Patience came up in a conversation Brett and I were having with some other people a while back, specifically how I’m not patient in a lot of things, and he said I didn’t need to be a virtuous person anyway.42D

But that’s my latest, as he calls it, war cry. The phrase “patience is a virtue” is leaving out so many other virtues that are just as important. Patience is not the only virtue!

So here is a short list of things that are also virtues. It is my hope that by bringing the attention of the world to this list, we can change that old cliche and make it reflect the truer nature of virtue and not focus on the limited view of patience.

• patience (ha!)
• chastity
• kindness
• generosity
• charity
• humility
• love
• honesty
• benevolence
• temperance
• diligence

At the October 2008 General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Sister Dalton of the Young Women General Presidency gave an address titled “A Return to Virtue.”

They put together a video about this return to virtue, and it’s not about patience. Instead it’s focusing completely on chastity (which is real real important), but for me, virtue is still a lot more than that. But it’s still a good video. (And chastity is so much more important than just for marriage. I’m chaste for me, not for some other person.)

So you see, I really am a virtuous person, just not so much with the patience thing all the time (and maybe not with the humility either), but definitely with the chastity side of it. And I’m definitely working on all the other aspects of virtue (even the patience part of it).