So, what's missing?

Well, as someone who has lived for half a century now, I would have to say “integrity” is missing. I often wonder if any of us actually know what that word means. For me, it means walking what I talk. It means consistency in both my attitudes and actions. It means finishing what I started. It means humility. It means walking in the fear of the Lord and not man. It means after “being” with the Lord, I then am ready for “doing” what He told me.

Let me give you an example fresh from the past couple of weeks. My church each New Year has a 21-day prayer and Daniel fast where we are encouraged to seek God for His heart and purposes. I am on a strict low-fat diet so fasting food wasn’t going to be a big sacrifice to me. I had to ask myself what was something I had become attached to that would be a sacrifice to give up. The Holy Spirit directed me to my phone. Here’s some background on my phone. I resisted upgrading to a smartphone for four years, and then when told it would help me stay in touch with my spiritual children, I relented. My reason for resisting in the first place was because I saw how addicting they were to the younger generation and even some of the older. People would be out with friends, and instead of being present “with” the person they were physically sitting “with,” they would be “with” someone over social media who wasn’t even there. I found it rude, selfish and very distracting. So, for the most part, I managed to be present in the moment by not having a smartphone and seemed the better for it. Then the day came when my friend convinced me this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and that I was living in the days of the dinosaurs by not having one. Once I agreed to get one, she told me all the apps I needed to download. All the while I’m asking, “What’s that?” and “How does it work?” All very mind-boggling for someone who loves paper! She said it would make my life easier. Well, once I got the hang of it, in some ways it did, and in some ways it made it more complicated. I wouldn’t go so far as to say all technology is evil and therefore should be banned from a Christian’s life. I would say, however, that anything we use or think about above, and outside God’s healthy and loving boundaries, can soon become an idol. Meaning they begin to control us, rather than us controlling them. I’m a spiritual mother to a lot of African young adults. Because I don’t get to see many of them on a regular basis, I was using “WhatsApp” to send them encouragements, find out how they were doing, make arrangements for meeting with them, etc. They would often do likewise mostly in the form of questions, advice, prayer requests, emergencies, etc. My daily routine would be when I woke up I would turn my phone on and read the messages that had come through after I had turned my phone off the previous night or I would send messages as I knew they would likely be online. I would also check my emails and respond to the ones I thought urgent. Because I work from home I didn’t need to be somewhere at a certain time so would make my breakfast and have my time with the Lord in His Word. That’s when the responses to my “Whatsapp” messages would begin to come in and I would flip between answering those and reading the Word, never fully focusing or concentrating on either.

So, what’s missing? More of that in Part 2. Now over to one of my spiritual daughters, Elle.

Barbara Killinger defines integrity as: a personal choice, an uncompromising and predictably consistent commitment to honour moral, ethical, spiritual and artistic values and principles. I’d like to add to that. I believe integrity is all of the above, but when it really counts, when I believe someone really shows integrity, is when they are uncompromising when no one is looking.

I think it’s easy to have integrity in public. It’s easy to be moral and upright in church, because you’re surrounded by people who (in most cases) are like-minded, have the same values and expect a certain type of behaviour. There are people holding you accountable.

I have also found it relatively easy to show integrity in my work environment, and it was easy, because I let everyone know very early on that I was a Christian. It hasn’t always been this way. In my first job, I didn’t tell anyone that I was a Christian and I found myself compromising because I wanted to fit in. It got to the point where, if I did tell people I was a Christian, they probably wouldn’t have believed me, because my behaviour (I worked in an office where everyone swore and I subsequently started swearing too), didn’t show it. I decided to do it differently going forward. When I started my current job, I let everyone know early on that I was a Christian – this was my way of making myself accountable. It became easy to have integrity because I had to back up what I had said about myself (that I was a Christian) and I found that my colleagues respected what I believed in, and would as much as they could, avoid putting me in situations where I had to compromise.

So for me – integrity, when I’m around people is pretty straightforward and pretty easy. But what happens when you’re on your own? When you’re in an environment where no one knows you’re a Christian? When the teller at the supermarket gives you too much change? When no one will find out the truth if you tell a white lie? It’s those times that I believe real integrity shows, because there is no one watching you, and you (and God), will be the only people who know how you choose to behave.

My biggest challenge and my biggest learning, when it comes to integrity, is being a person of integrity when I am alone at home when no one is watching me. It’s learning to have integrity when there is no one to hold me accountable. It’s doing the right, honest and good thing even when it’s the harder road to take, and it’s taking that road knowing that it is a road I take, whether or not someone is watching.