What Does Integrity Require of Us?

I waited two weeks longer than I usually would to reflect on 2020. Sometimes it takes some distance to see clearly what is impactful in the moment but less relevant to carry forward into the new year. My goal is always to figure out what I learned that I need to hang on to for longer than just that season.

Last year brought a lot of those pivotal moments that offered insight and perspective on things I have never experienced, but many of those things created unique disruptions that hopefully will not be repeated in 2021 and future years. Especially with the election season, which here in Georgia and also in Washington spilled into the first week of the new year. Having been mired in the political noise the last quarter of 2020, I needed a week to process since that ended in a runoff election on January 5th and the emotion poured over into the following day.

For me, there were four major seasons of 2020. First, the year began with launching For Influence and transitioning from being a salaried employee to self-employment. Second, the pandemic hit the US causing lockdowns, mask debates, and all the relational friction created by pressure and change. Third, we experienced a renewed emphasis on inequality and systemic injustice with discussions about a K recovery and bias in policing and our legal system. And fourth the election ratcheted up the intensity of disagreements and the urgency of convincing voters what hangs in the balance of the outcome. 

The year began with a tension between my need to follow a calling on my life, and my wife’s very practical and understandable need for me to provide for my family. I went on a retreat seeking a business plan that would give me direction and my wife security, but instead what I came away with was a sense that I need to honor and defer to her as an anchor I am blessed to have, not an impediment holding me back from following God with reckless abandon. 

The next season is when I decided to stop speaking so much and try to listen more. The lockdown put our family in close quarters with a lot of friction as we tried to adapt under the pressures of uncertainty and disappointment. Personally, I vacillated between powering up trying to control things that were not mine to control and trying to escape from the frustration and disappointment in unhealthy and damaging ways that hurt my family. Almost like I was rioting against outcomes I refused to accept in our own home. 

Having begun to deal with those issues and the damage I had done to my marriage and the climate of our family, almost immediately after I saw a similar pattern playing out in a much larger scale. First with cries of mask mandates and lockdowns infringing on civil liberty, then with social unrest and demands for changing unacceptable outcomes in society. Front line workers being financially hurt and put in harm’s way without adequate protection, communities devastated by injury at the hands of police and courts that should have protected them, and a divided narrative over who is right. 

And the election has obviously stretched the fabric of our democracy as the two main parties grow further apart over what is right, and factions within parties argue over whether moderate bipartisan action is enough to drive meaningful change. I will ignore what transpired since the end of 2020, but the rhetoric around the candidates and the unwillingness to accept the “other side” as having a valid perspective only escalated when “vote like your lives depend on it” spilled over into fighting the outcome like lives depend on it.

These all felt connected, and as I repeatedly wrote and then decided against sharing my thoughts on each season, this common theme kept coming up time and again. The best way I had been able to articulate it by the end of the year was using Andy Stanley’s phrase, “What does love require of me?” But that kept falling flat as people dismissed love as irrelevant to each issue. 

What does love have to do with survival in business? What does love have to do with mandating restrictions in a pandemic? What does love have to do with addressing systemic bias and inequality? What does love have to do with politics? After all, we are electing government representatives not picking a prom date, as I often heard in response.

It wasn’t until I heard Boyd Bailey speak at Souly Business last week that the final puzzle piece linking the complete picture of last year fell into place for me. Boyd talked about integrity in a way I have heard before, but never been able to apply in such a new and relevant way to our current environment. Integrity was introduced as the lubricant that makes things work. Without it, components that were designed to work together end up tearing each other apart instead. 

Integrity is what enables us to encounter friction without the temperature rising out of control until something is damaged or broken. Integrity is what allows a person to do the right thing even when it has an unfair penalty. Guarded by integrity, we can actually press into the friction and endure the pressure without binding and seizing up. Joseph did this when he did the right thing and found favor with a jailer he never should have known. Rather than avoiding the friction of conflict, integrity empowers us to lean in and understand it so we can manage it well rather than powering up to eliminate it.

I have seen the lack of integrity tearing supply chains apart, and saw that happen with many businesses as the pandemic disrupted suppliers and customers around the world. Lack of integrity had created friction, which had been manageable with contracts and arbitration until the pressure increased as waves of covid impacts hurt businesses everywhere. The friction suddenly became too much and businesses suffered, especially where relationships were not built on integrity.

I experienced lack of integrity in my home, where my own inconsistency in asking what love requires of me in every moment left my wife and kids wondering if they would get a servant leader response or tyrant dad demanding control or disappearing to escape. My dad pointed out that a pilot who only crashes 1% of the time wouldn’t get credit for the 99% they are flawless, only fear and consequences from the failures. God gives boundless grace for our crashes, but we still have to live with the climate they create.

Integrity is the lubricant that makes things work. Without it, components that were designed to work together will instead tear each other apart.

Social unrest was an eye opener for me, as I watched 13th and began listening to how others experience the world instead of defending my perspective and the narratives I believed to be universally true. In large and countless small ways we can see from the outcomes that many systems have at best unintended biases, and quite likely were influenced by biased people who intended to favor some groups over others. You see this in prison populations and wealth concentration, and it would seem we need to sit with the discomfort of that long enough to change. 

Interestingly, those who now question the integrity of our elections are a very different group than those who question the integrity of our criminal and economic systems. I don’t know how a party can continue to accuse their own party of fraud in an election overseen by their own party after judges appointed by the same party said their allegations had no merit. Yet here we are. 

2020 brought a lot of friction due to a shortage of lubricant everywhere, in business, individuals, government leaders, our criminal justice system, and our election system. There is a temptation to want to assign blame for the damage and failures of these systems, but a few weeks removed from the year it becomes obvious that what we saw was not a result of flawed systems, but a lack of lubricant. If you don’t put lubricant in a car engine designed to work flawlessly when properly lubricated, it will bind up and seize.

We have a car that had an engine defect, where metal shavings blocked the ducts that lubricate the pistons. There were no warning lights, no signs of trouble, and suddenly the engine seized, never to fire again. The engine block was replaced under warranty, but at much greater expense than others that were recalled so the shavings could be removed before they seized.

We as a society, and especially as Christians, are seeing a lot of symptoms that our integrity is blocked. Just as a car engine needs to have oil put in and frequently checked, refreshed, and topped off, we need to make sure that our integrity wells are full of quality lubricant and daily check the levels and top it off. Integrity is rooted in knowing that we are in a right relationship with God, we are His beloved and nothing can change his love and grace toward us.

But even knowing our integrity supply is full, we need to be watchful for any signs that something is blocking our integrity and allowing friction to build up. Signs like others not believing our words and actions are sincere. Signs like dismissing a narrative from “the other side” as incompatible with our own narrative and therefore wrong. Signs like growing suspicion or contempt for those who disagree with us. These are all evidence of friction building up due to lack of integrity. 

Integrity is willing to be the one to start a dialogue, not to prove that we are right but to understand why there is friction. Integrity seeks to restore smooth operation, not to increase the pressure and friction. Even being “right” without integrity will increase the temperature until the relationship breaks. Just as engine components designed to work together will seize and stop functioning without lubricant, we will eventually lose influence if we do all the right things without the lubricant of humble integrity.

So the phrase I am carrying forward from 2020 into the next year, with whatever frictions it may hold, is “What does integrity require of us?” Let’s be secure enough in our relationship with God to lean in and understand the frictions we encounter, and be the ones poring the lubricant of integrity into them seeking to bring restoration.