Integrity

How would you like to have something like this said about you? The quote below was written by a friend and fellow officer of the Kansas Highway Patrol about one of our members who passed away recently. He had a career in the Highway Patrol and retired as a Major.

“Your integrity was never questioned as a member of the Kansas Highway Patrol nor has ever been surpassed. It was an honor to work under your command.”

Integrity can be defined as a “concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one’s actions.”

Are you a person of integrity? Do you even think of that concept in your daily life and living? On a scale of 1 to 10, how would someone else rate the measure of integrity that they see in you?

To be a person of integrity requires hard work, diligent decision-making, honest debate within oneself, and the willingness to do the right thing even when there is a cost. A person of true integrity will lay it all on the line...job, status, wealth...it doesn't matter...in order to make the consistently honest and truthful decisions that equate with the values and principles one espouses.

So, where does true integrity come from? What makes a person sacrifice wealth, power, and status to maintain his or her integrity? What is it that causes someone to lay it all on the line in order to do right?

There is a spiritual aspect at work here. There is a spiritual transformation that must take place in the heart and mind of the individual in order for integrity to be a normal part of that person's life. For, you see, the norm for a human being is to shun integrity and embrace greed....shun integrity and embrace the more base elements of life. It takes a transformation to embrace the good over the base. And that transformation can best be described as spiritual in nature.

Integrity. Will you be known as a person of integrity when you are no longer alive? Will you be known as one who rose above the human norm and embraced the good, the noble, and the right?