“Of Mistakes and Integrity: Jeff”
“May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you.” (Proverbs 25:21, English Standard Version)
As a recovering addict, I use daily affirmations in order to keep myself more or less on track. My affirmation yesterday was as follows:
“Today, by God’s grace, I am expecting to make mistakes, and expecting others to make mistakes too. Neither my mistakes nor those of others define who we are in God’s eyes.”
Little did I know how that affirmation would play out during the day!
In the afternoon, my wife and I heard a strange rattling sound outside. The trash collectors and recycling team had already come and gone, so we weren’t sure what had happened. A couple of minutes later, the answer rang our doorbell. And the answer had a name: Jeff.
It seems that Jeff had knocked over our mailbox. That happened a few years ago, and the driver drove on. I had to replace the mailbox at my own expense. In view of how narrow the road is and how close to the road the mailbox is, the surprising thing is that the mailbox has only been hit twice in the seventeen plus years that we’ve lived here.
Mistakes happen. Mine, yours, everybody’s. Most of the time, we just keep going. Jeff didn’t. Why? Because that was the way his dad had raised him.
Integrity doesn’t mean not making mistakes. Integrity means having the courage to admit them and, as best you can, making things right. In this case, “Jeff” was another name for integrity.
Eighteen years ago, I came clean with people I had harmed with my addiction. It was and is a costly process. There are people whom I love who no longer speak to me. There are people who believe that I have not come clean about everything. That is an understandable belief. It is also wrong.
But here is the conclusion I’ve come to: Integrity—at any price—is a bargain. The opposite of integrity (or wholeness) is scatteredness. And who wants to be scattered and blowing in the wind? We need more Jeffs in the world. We need to make sure we are being more like Jeff.
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