| | There’s a leftover salad in my fridge. Most of it is probably still good, but the tomatoes are moldy. Even though I could potentially just pick out the tomatoes, I’ll toss the whole thing. Their juice is probably on everything, and now I just don’t trust it all.
The salad, I guess, lacks integrity.
I’ve been thinking a lot about integrity lately. Erwin McManus says "integrity" has to do with "integration," and I think that’s true. I have integrity to the extent that the character of God has been integrated into my life. It sounds so basic. But it’s so counter to the way we think.
I’ve been writing goals for personal growth at the beginning of every year for a long time. And I did for 2009, too. But I think my attitude toward them has changed this year. In the past I’ve often had over-arching themes to my goals. “I really feel like God is stretching me in the area of prayer this year.” Or, “I’m feeling challenged to work on my relationship with others this year.”
And probably God does work on certain areas of our lives at times because He knows we can’t handle working on everything all at once. But I still wonder if I’ve been missing something in the way I look at it.
The more I get to know God, the more I grow in Him, the more I find that everything is intertwined. Things just don’t separate neatly in boxes like I thought. I can’t focus on prayer and ignore my relationships with others. My love for Him needs to change the way I relate to people. And I can’t love others well without loving Him well.
I wonder if sometimes we make goals about longer quiet times, praying more, etc. because it makes us feel better about ourselves while ignoring the real litmus test of our love for God: the way we treat people.
John (arguably the man closest to Jesus when He was on earth), wrote, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And He has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 John 4:20–21).
In other words, something is wrong if we’re having longer quiet times but the way we treat out family, friends, neighbors, and enemies isn’t changing. We can’t actually be loving God more if it doesn’t lead us to love people more. The way I spend my money is inexorably connected to the words I speak, and my relationship with my husband by necessity is tied to my relationship with God. My life is a whole.
Like I said, I still wrote goals this year. Still small, specific ones, about my time with God, my finances, and my ministry. I still think growing in the little areas helps… after all, integrity is formed in the nitty-gritty areas of life few people see.
But success for me is no longer found in checking goals off a list. It’s in seeing that today, perhaps, I am more like Jesus than I was yesterday. His heart is integrating with mine, and I am growing in integrity. Slowly.
Integrity may be a slow, painful, lifelong process with a lot of glitches along the way, but I am on that path, longing for the day when all my life will be integrated with God. And nothing will be rotten.
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| | Posted 2/16/2009 1:33 PM - 4 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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