Honesty Among Men

If you’ve known me at all, you know I speak candidly about the importance of our humility before God. Throughout the Bible you see example after example of man’s greatest asset being, “to walk humbly with our God.”

But what about with each other?  What is our greatest asset with one another?  I believe it is to live honestly. Our nature is to gravitate toward the soul in the room that is comfortable in their own skin.  Who really makes it a quest to find the loud, storytelling idiot at the dinner party that begins each paragraph with an “I”?  If you are on a quest to find him or her, you know full well that is it to laugh hysterically at the antics later with your date.

Mother Teresa lived honest.  She walked humbly with her God and she lived honest.

Honesty fosters intimacy.  No one holds the answers to a perfect life or full-time happiness.  Those brave souls willing to pull off their masks look directly into the eyes of their listener – transparent intimacy.  Mask entertain, but will never connect, they are not living creations – only colorful distractions.

Honesty promotes reality.  We live in a world of images and messaging.  It is unfortunate that so many have become a Facebook icon and lost the art of presenting themselves in light of reality. Images have to be maintained, honesty lives in the present – taking each moment in for what it is and what it feels like to walk through it.

Honesty encourages healing.  I am blessed to be a part of an intimate group of women that share directly from their hearts.  Through our stories and our experiences we’ve been able to help each other heal our common wounds.  Our leader took off her mask of togetherness and her high-society image to replace it with a story of pain and redemption.  That night changed our climate – it created a safe environment for honest healing.

Honesty is freedom.  Our American culture has created a breed of working men and women stuck in the spider web of lies.  The corporate do’s and don’ts is a book never read in college yet practiced widely among our workforce.  Check out the push back.  How many movements of simplicity and freedom have come from the rebels not willing to submit to this cultural phenomenon?  Too many to mention.  Honesty is the umbrella over simplicity, without it you can never arrive at simple living.  Yet with it, you are free to roam in any genre of life.  Your occupation is no longer confining because regardless of what collar you are sporting, you live fearlessly honest.

Honesty provides a goodnight’s sleep.  I am embarrassed to admit the number of evenings that I laid awake hoping that the timing of my comments or conversations landed so perfectly as to not expose my flowery rhetoric simply called white lies.  You need not expose yourself here.  I will do it for both of us.  It is painful.  It is frightening.  When you’ve chosen to be dishonest in your conversations, you’ve chosen to have a sleepless night or two.  You’ve chosen to lose your own respect and battle the ugliness of the human spirit.  An honest day provides a goodnight’s sleep.

Honesty under its hierarchy of humility engages humanity.  How can I say that?  How could I not, really. When our lives are under the direction of our Creator, we cannot help but to love His creation.  With downed defenses, we are no longer competing with our siblings we are free to love them. Free to look at them through the lenses of value and purpose.  With honest reflection, we are all one poor decision away from being in a position of need.  Honesty tells us that we are privileged if we have no apparent needs.  Only a fool believes that life is constant and that their needs will always be met.  If you are that fool, please change.  Please realize that you live in a world of uncertainty and that if you are blessed –  it is in fact a blessing.  Many peoples and populations have unmatched skill sets, yet they find themselves in need.  An honest person, under divine authority, recognizes their own mortality and insignificance outside of a universal hierarchy.  If you are a CEO, you remain, as insignificant as the rest of us outside of the purpose of your own creation.

“I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”  

George Washington

Me, too, George…me, too.

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