A few weeks ago, I heard integrity defined as, “doing what you’re supposed to do when no one is watching.” While I think that is a good definition, I think it goes a little deeper than that. While I pondered over my driving incident I thought, “she probably would be very polite if she came up behind me in the grocery store and wanted me to move my cart.” Yet, get people behind the wheel and they get real nasty. Why is that? It’s called degrees of separation and that leads to an integrity problem. Because she is isolated, removed from seeing my face, hearing me, and sterilized and protected behind auto glass, she acts on her gut impulses. Not because she doesn’t think no one will see, but because she knows that she probably won’t have to deal with the ramifications of her actions. Wow, life is like that. It’s pretty easy to think no one is watching us in this world. It’s pretty easy to assume that God can’t hear us and that there will not be any ramifications for a lack of integrity.

While in this thought, I remembered a time when I was at San Diego Zoo, watching a preteen taunt and mock a lion. To hear him, you’d think he could really kick some lion butt, but the kid was on the other side of the glass from this beast that could kill him just with a growl (no correlation intended between this incident and my driving incident). The world is like that. How many people would try and work out their differences if they knew there was no law to hide behind? How many people would change their vocabulary if they thought that certain others might hear them? How many would vote their conscious in congress if they knew that their voting record was being read by their constituents every day? I see this lack of integrity a lot at my job. In an email, people can really pack in the adjectives, but get them on the phone to resolve the matter and they are very different people and some will even apologize. The startling thing about this epiphany was when I realized we do the same thing with our thoughts. We think and even play-out entire scenes on our private stages thinking no one will hear, no one will see, and the biggest lie of all, that it hurts no one. Of course, first of all it hurts us personally and second estranges us from God and third, estranges us from the person in our private thoughts. The Bible even says that “God, who sees and hears in private, will reward thee openly.” Wow, another epiphany, even our private thoughts will be rewarded (positively or negatively) openly. The lie that we can do naughty things when no one is looking, listening, or when they are in our minds only, is probably the single biggest carnal flaw of mankind and perhaps even the root of all evil. Ask any motivational speaker and they will tell you that ALL of our actions are born out of and can be traced back to a single thought.