Integrity

I know I haven't posted in a while, I got off track with other things and lost focus a little bit (I have several posts started, it's the finishing that I'm having trouble with!).

This post comes from a couple of conversations I've had recently with my daughter and +Rachel Harrell. My daughter triggered my thoughts here earlier this week with a conversation about returning the vacuum she bought.  A few months ago, our vacuum broke and Katelyn decided she'd replace it for me.  As a waitress she doesn't have a whole lot of money so naturally she went for the cheapest that looked like it would work.  Unfortunately when we got it home it turned out she had accidentally gotten one that required bags instead of a cyclonic.  Well long story short, we really needed the vacuum right away so she decided that we'd keep it.  Fast forward a little while and finding vacuum bags has been a pain for this (why the places that sell that model don't carry the bags that fit it is beyond me) and Katelyn was definitely regretting the purchase.  She mentioned it to a friend of hers that works for the grocery/superstore that we got it from and she told Katelyn "You know if you tell us that it doesn't work, we'll take it back even without the receipt".  Later on that day Katelyn mentioned it to me, and I said simply "well that sounds good, but you'd have to lie." She thought about it for a moment and answered "I don't want to do that, never mind."

Thinking about that conversation later, it struck me how cheaply we sell our integrity for these days. How many times, for $50, $100 or even more do we sell out the thing that is much more valuable than money can ever be. We have our rationalizations of course: "they're a huge corporation they won't miss it" "they don't pay their people enough they deserve it" "I got cheated out of money by them, time for payback" or whatever, but at the end of the day, we're valuing that money (whose value is guaranteed to decrease over time due to inflation) more than our own integrity.

Another example I can give (and this time I'm calling out myself) is I got called out for something I hadn't done at the end of last week.  There was a report I was supposed to be sending out (the data had to be manually imported every morning so I couldn't automate it), and it just completely slipped my mind.  Now even though there weren't going to be any real consequences for this, when I was asked why it hadn't been sent out, a million excuses, well lies really, came to my mind. Every single one of them was absolutely plausible, a great reason why it wasn't done, completely provable (if I needed to), and of course a complete falsehood. There is no way anyone would've known that I lied and the incident would've been dismissed as if nothing happened.  I was writing the email with my best "reason" when I came to my senses and realized that no job, no praise/criticism from the boss, nothing was worth losing my integrity over.  I changed the email to the real reason (I was busy with other stuff and completely forgot), sent it, and haven't heard about it since. Maybe that loses me points on my review or has further ramifications in the future (though I doubt it), but I don't care. I honestly am ashamed that I got as close as I did to lying about something that is, in the grand scheme of things, utterly inconsequential.

I may be a bit old-fashioned, but I think that quote says it all. What do you do when you and God are the only ones that will know? I know cheating a store out of $5 or a "white lie" to get out of trouble doesn't seem like much but the problem is little things matter.  Anyone who has been married (and especially divorced) knows that the little things add up, for good or for bad.  More important is the effect on your character.  Just about every person I've read about that was arrested for embezzling millions of dollars from a company started small with a few bucks here and there that didn't get noticed.  From there it just grows.  As it says in Luke 16:10

Luke 16:10  “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much."

 It doesn't matter how small the issue is, if you're willing to sell out for that little, seemingly inconsequential thing, the next time you'll stretch to something a little bit bigger and there will be more places you decide to cut corners. Eventually this will spread to your entire life.  While your friends, co-workers, and family may not know what exactly you're doing, that lack of integrity will show up in your relationships with them as well.

This quote pretty much sums up a couple conversations +Rachel Harrell and I had recently. We were talking about being "old-fashioned" and what exactly it meant. Rachel was talking about values like integrity, honesty, faithfulness, honor and how important they are to her and how that made her a bit old-fashioned.    After talking along these lines for a while, I suddenly had the epiphany that "these aren't old-fashioned...they're right vs wrong." Truly they aren't old-fashioned, it's just that we as a society stopped caring about them.  The people that still follow them (and sadly I haven't always, but I'm learning...my dad was a great teacher of these principles) are the ones everyone count on. The ones that people implicitly trust their word, that a handshake is as good as a contract.  I think we just need more of them, and need to start electing them (or rework the system so they can get elected...a system where you expect every politician to be a crook doesn't seem to be a healthy one to me). I don't know that returning to these values would solve all of the problems in our society, but I do know it would solve a lot of them.