Integritty

I seem to have integrity on my mind lately. It peppers my conversation quite a bit. Probably to the point of being a broken record.

Up to recently, integrity has been more of an ethical concept to me than a spiritual one. It’s the thing that every business says they want their employees to have. It’s what Steven Covey has made a zillion dollars talking about. To me, integrity has been sort of a sterile, moral concept that is about being a straight-shooter and an upstanding person. Ward and June Cleaver were my integrity icons.

Then, not long ago, I was wading around in some internet ooze and I tripped over a statement that said integrity is about being totally consistent and predictable, no matter what the setting or situation. It’s not as much about being moral all the time. It’s about being who you are all the time. Now, that gave the bland old word a little kick. It gave me images of people who are authentic and real no matter what, no matter where. Old crusts who tell it like it is and don’t care who hears them. Young turks who are as boldly irreverent around authority figures as they are around their friends. Gentlemen and ladies who are as courteous and polite around their spouses and families as they are with strangers.

There’s just something really, really appealing about this brand of integrity. Just think if we all could be ourselves all the time. No airs. No hypocrisy. No two-facedness. Just who we are, wherever we are, all the time. Good or bad, everyone knowing where everyone stands. People who are consistently good or predictably bad or unswervingly ambivalent: all would be considered people of integrity.

But this is where the integrity thing gets gritty. It draws some real questions for me. Maybe for the integrity-purist, being who-we-are-all-the-time, no-matter-what-we-are is a noble pursuit. It probably is more noble than going around being a chameleon, changing our colors each time we walk through a church door, or an office door or the side door of our home. But for a follower of Jesus, another layer of degree of complexity is added. Not only are we to be who we are, all the time, no matter what. We are also called to be like Jesus all the time, all the time, no matter what. Can those two ideas live in the same body? Well, I if “who you are” just happens to be just like Jesus, I guess it’s not a problem. But what about the rest of us? What do we do with genuineness and being true to who God made us? Do we live out integrity by consistently stuffing our identity and faking that of Jesus?

That’s a tough one. I think we really are called to be consistently, predictably like Him. And we are to be true to how he made us. How do we do that? How do we stitch the two together? Is it possible that we find the answer when we look at Jesus’ ability to be fully God and fully human? I am not suggesting that we could ever be fully God, but could that same dynamic that went on in Jesus take place in us? Could we allow that which is fully human to live consistently through us as long as it doesn’t conflict with the godly? Can we totally be ourselves all the time, everywhere, accept when it isn’t being totally Christlike? Could it be that, in the world of the Kingdom, where the Holy Spirit brings about unlikely but true change that “being myself” grows closer to “being like Jesus” until they dance together, foot-in-shoe, everywhere, all the time?

I am asking the question. If you have an idea, leave a comment.

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This entry was posted on June 13th, 2007 and is filed under Doug Cooper. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.