the sojourner

Integrity Component # 3: Getting Results

Here’s a good question for someone: What does integrity mean?
For some, if a person shows up on time, usually doesn’t lie and can be relied upon to put a few extra hours in at the office, this means that they are a person of integrity. I’m going to suggest that these and other behaviors we confuse as integrity are not in and of themselves integrity. As a matter of fact, it’s fairly common that a person who usually doesn’t lie, arrives to work on time or puts in extra hours is really is operating in this behavior because it best fits their needs. In other words, it’s better for a person to “keep their nose clean� because it will allow a person to keep their job, vocation, friends, church involvement, etc.

In our conversation about integrity, there’s a need to look deeper than the perceived behavior of a person; however behavior is an essential starting point. The inside, as Dr. Cloud indicates, always comes out and what comes out is what others experience from us. Dr. Cloud uses the analogy of a boat wake to explain this idea and it offers us a mental picture to keep in mind as we walk through our day impacting other people’s lives. As a boat travels through water it creates a wake and every wake has two lines, which emanate from the force that created them (or the boat).

If a person is a force (and at some level, we all are) we leave a wake behind as well: for our illustration, one of the lines will represent tasks and the other relationships. Our wake is what we leave behind once we have moved through someplace. Wakes are unavoidable and don’t lie.

If you take an honest look at your wake—especially as a leader and as Christians we are all leaders according to our commission in Matthew 28—and if you find your tasks are incomplete or (worse) that relationships you leave behind are less than ideal or beneficial for the other person and yourself, it’s time to take a serious, honest assessment of what you have allowed your character to become.

You either have an integrated character that can meet the demands of reality or a disintegrated character marked by pain (yours and others), deceit, and faulting living. Scripture tells us that God is interested in our inner parts, who we are at our core: Surely you desire truth in the inner parts; you teach me wisdom in the innermost place (Psalms 51:6, NIV).

Integrity is our inner core.