BYU (Brigham Young University) is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often mistakenly called the “Mormon Church.” BYU students take nearly a semester of spiritually uplifting, stimulating religion classes.
In this series (see below), students enrolled in scripture study classes have shared their thoughts, insights, and reflections on the Book of Mormon in the form of letters to someone they know. We invite you to take a look at their epiphanies and discoveries as they delve into the scriptures.
In publishing these, we fulfill their desire to speak to all of us of the relevance, power and beauty of the Book of Mormon, a second witness of Jesus Christ and complement to the Bible. The Book of Mormon includes the religious history of a group of Israelites who settled in ancient America. (The names they use are those of prophets who taught the Book of Mormon peoples to look forward to the coming of Christ—Nephi, Lehi, Alma, Helaman, and other unfamiliar names. We hope those names will become more familiar to you as you read their inspiring words and feel the relevance and divinity of their messages through these letters.)
Let us know if you’d like to receive your own digital copy of the Book of Mormon, and/or if these messages encourage and assist you spiritually as well.
Mormon Thoughts: Searching for Humility
I’ve been trying to focus a lot on pride and humility in the past few weeks. It’s been awhile since I really got into figuring out how prevalent pride is in life around us. Pride is hard to see because it is so natural.
So easy to live life in comparison! How do I not? How do we not?
I’m convinced it’s got to be such a gradual thing. Everyone has different degrees of pride or humility inside them, just because that’s how our spirits are organized. Nobody is one block color (we’re all mixed up shades of bluish grayish yellowish greenish white). But with the help of a dear friend’s writing and advice and some comments in my Book of Mormon class, I’ve got some cool insights!
The pride cycle is a pattern evident in the scriptures in basically any group of normal people. I needed the reminder we had in class about it. You can really start at any point in the cycle and tell a story. This is my story, adapted from Helaman 11 where the people go from “rejoice and glorify God, and the whole face of the land was filled with rejoicing” to “they did wax stronger and stronger in their pride, and in their wickedness; and thus they were ripening again for destruction” in 10 years.
I’m doing well and I enjoy it. I start to love how well I’m doing and get mad if anything goes wrong. I think of my success as mine, something God may have started me with but I’ve earned on my own. Then it’s mine alone, and I basically just want everything in my life to go right so I can be popular, handsome, and have the envy of the people around me. There’s the comparison, there it goes, and now I’m fighting, I’m frustrated, I sacrifice people for things, I’m selfish and I don’t really care or get excited for the successes of the people I know. Then I start to fail as my grades slip, I can’t focus in class, I feel like crap when I wake up in the morning, and nothing goes right. Finally, in desperation I pray and ask for forgiveness, with nowhere else to go and no one else but the One who can save me from myself. The prayer is answered, life begins slowly to brighten, people talk to me again, my studies feel more natural and worthwhile, and I feel the presence of holiness in my life.
Thus it goes, and at the center, at the turning point, is God Himself, waiting to help.
The goal is to get prosperity—> humility—> repentance—> blessings —> prosperity as the endless staircase upwards,
and to abolish the pride —> sin—> destruction—> anger—> pride cycle from my life.
It is possible; just so much concentration needed. But so possible.
I wrote 7 steps in my journal to seek humility:
1) Accept yourself. Not your flaws, those should change, but accept that your spirit cannot do or be anything else other than what God made you.
2) Accept that you are not more important than the people around you. You are important, but other people also have the same organized, unique spirits and are important even if they seem or act unimportant.
3) Learn to love the ways that people you see are different from you. Find how they are more gifted than you in one way, and focus on that with all you willpower until you can love it.
4) Study the selflessness of Jesus Christ, who “pleased not Himself and sought not His own honor”.
5) Develop empathy. Try to be happy for other because they are happy, even if you are not. Try to feel anguish at the anguish of others, even when they give you nothing and everything in your life is going right. These two empathies are equal in the eyes of humility.
6) Try to trust God as much, if not more, than you trust yourself.
7) Realize you are not doing as badly as you think.
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