Integrity? Where did it go?
My daughter sold a horse a few months ago. The lady who bought it did not pay her, saying that she would give her the money within a few days. But the days extended to weeks, then months. Each time my daughter called her she had a varying list of excuses: “My father died and I had to spend 1000’s of dollars on the funeral.” “We had a foot of floodwaters in our house.” “My other horse almost died and the vet bill was astronomical - but I’ll pay you next week.” She gave all these excuses while driving a state of the art pickup truck with GPS and a fancy horse trailer.
My daughter finally decided yesterday to go repossess the horse (which was a former barrel racing champion.) I went along as the big tough guy! As we drove, she was praying like crazy that everything would go smoothly. The drive was about an hour away so we had a good time together.
When we arrived to a nice ranch out in the country, Krista commented “Hmmm, I wonder where the creek was that flooded their house.” It must have been a flood that covered several hundred square miles that we didn’t hear about because her house was on a rise! She was walking hurriedly to the paddock where the horse was grazing. Her husband and two big dogs surrounded our car, and he looked like a motorcycle/car fanatic. We rolled open our window and asked if this was the right place. He said “Don’t worry about the dogs, their bark is worse than their bite, and so is mine! My wife just headed around the corner.”
We walked around the corner of his shop toward the paddock and there caught up with her. My daughter didn’t even have to tell her that we had come to pick up the horse. She immediately began making excuses: “My father in law died…” (notice the discrepancies!) “My other horse injured his hoof and I have spent all morning changing the bandage.” (The bandage hadn’t been changed in days it looked like.) etc. Meanwhile I went to talk to the husband who seemed like a nice guy. We talked about cars and he showed me his shop. And then after loading the horse we left.
As we were driving back we talked about integrity. I thought “where did it go?” It occurs to me that my baby boomer generation has totally lost the teaching of integrity to the next generation. It used to be that people thought highly of their word which was given. Nowadays it’s hard to find honesty and integrity.
Mirriam-Webster’s defines integrity thus:
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English integrite, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French integrité, from Latin integritat-, integritas, from integr-, integer entire
1 : firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : INCORRUPTIBILITY
2 : an unimpaired condition : SOUNDNESS
3 : the quality or state of being complete or undivided : COMPLETENESS
synonym see HONESTY
Integrity really is a by-product of faith. When you can trust God, for example, in your finances you don’t need to make excuses or tell lies in order to cover up or gloss over your weakness. The Bible says it this way:
Look here, you people who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” How do you know what will happen tomorrow? For your life is like the morning fog – it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.” Otherwise you will be boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil. Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.
James 4:13-17 nlt
How do we get integrity back into our culture? A good start is to keep our promises, and not make promises that we won’t or can’t keep.
