My young cyber friend, David, has a problem. His parents divorced when he was little. He and his brother lived with his mother in Kenya, where she worked hard to provide food, a home and family life for her boys, with precious little help or support from their father. “Our life was hard, but there was much love in our home,” David told me. But recently, David’s father has re-entered their lives. “Now he wants to be our father,” David said. “He says he is sorry he left us, and he wants to be with us.” David is now 25, and is still searching for something to do with his life. His father wants to take him into his thriving business. After a lifetime of struggle and want, David's father holds out to him a glimmer of hope for a secure future. “He seems to be sincere in his desire to make things right with us,” David says. “To have a job, to have a father it is appealing.” But perhaps not to David's mother. She hasn’t said how she feels about the sudden re-emergence of her ex-husband. But it’s clear that she’s at least threatened, if not outright outraged. David feels that he has to make a choice between loyalty to his mother, who has been there for him all his life, and forgiveness for his father, who may represent his hope for the future. “I ask you for advice,” he wrote. “I do not wish to offend my mother, especially not after all she has done for me. But my religion teaches me to forgive all men including my father.” Loyalty or forgiveness which is the greater value? It seems to me that life’s most difficult choices are not between right and wrong. For the most part, those calls are pretty easy to make. But choosing between cherished virtues puts our souls on trial. For most of the first 22 years of our married life, my wife, Anita, was a full-time homemaker. It’s the only career she ever really wanted, and she’s very good at it. If I were as good at my work as she is at hers, we’d be fabulously wealthy. But I’m not and we’re not, which bring us to something else Anita values: financial integrity. Very early in our married life she took over our finances because she realized that she had married a well-intentioned man who is a complete idiot when it comes to money management. She has done a remarkable job since then of keeping us solvent and up-to-date. It has always been important to her that we pay our obligations, and that we pay them on time. Amazingly, she was able to do just that until about 12 years ago. She had somehow managed to get us through two years of unemployment and the loss of a major monthly freelance fee. But when our two eldest children announced that not only were they both going to be married, but both weddings were going to take place within three weeks of each other - well, our financial structure, already tenuous, crumbled like a house of credit cards. Anita had to make a choice between two things she valued. If she continued to stay home full-time, we wouldn’t be able to pay our obligations (including our share of two weddings). But if she went to work outside the home, she would miss important time with our three younger children. It was a tough choice between positive virtues, requiring much thought, discussion and prayer. I’m not going to tell you what she chose. That’s not the point. But I will tell you that it has worked out pretty well. We’ve had to make some sacrifices, and there have been some tough times. But things have a way of working out when you make values-based decisions. It’s like I told David: “Trust your instincts. Listen to God speak to your heart. You’ll know which choice is right.” Even when both choices are right.