Sunday February 21,2010 Day 21

Integrity
If you only had one month to live you would want to review your character, your integrity. How have I acted? Have I been true to myself and others? You would want to learn from past mistakes,fix what you could ,and make peace with others. You would want your life to be whole and not settle for less than what you were made to be.
Integrity means wholeness ,not fractured. When you lack integrity you act one way at church and another way atyour job or school. A true sign of strength and character is to be the same no matter who we are with or where we are. Proverbs 28:6 says " Better to be a poor person who has integrity than to be rich and double dealing.
We can't put a price tag on integrity. When you have integrity it fills you with peace, passion, and a zest for life! It also brings extreme calmness in a crazy world!
Keeping up an image to impress people takes tremendous effort and endless amounts of energy. When what you see is what you get, that is integrity. Integrity is who you are when no one else is looking.
I have never been one to keep up to someone elses standards. But many people struggle with status in this world.
People lose integrity by lying. I have never tried much to lie as I didnt think I would be good at it. When you lie you have to rememeber who you told what and then make up another lie to cover the first one and on and on .I can't remember what I ate for breakfast let alone worrying about blowing my cover!
I know growing up my dad used to always say "Laura, dont you care what other people think?" I was a rebellious child and he was "someone" in town and I just did not care what people thought. Even when I was struggling , I wanted people to accept me for who I was.
Later in life when I truly thought I was living a life of integrity ,I know realize I wasn't as I would go out into the world and pretend things were perfect in church and our place of business while all the while I was living a terribly abused homelife. That is not integrity.
The real reason we lie is because we don't love enough. Lyingis an easy route for our own selfish convience. It's taking the easy road.If you risk loving , then you will tell the truth .The more you love , the less you lie. The more you love, the more you have the courage to tell the truth.
The great news is because the gift of the cross we have recieved a gift of a lifetime! We could never earn it or be good enough to get it on our own ! God loves us just because of who we are and not because of anything we have done. He can restore us and make our lives whole no matter how many times we have messed up!
Take a piece of paper and draw a large circle in the center of it, divide it into a pie with eight pieces, then label it with each section of your life, job, kids, hobbies, marriage , etc. Are you living out your values in each of these areas?
Some of these one month to live posts have exerpts from te book so what I write that applies to my own life will make sense, those that know me & how I write it is obvious what is mine and what is Exerpts, but I needed to add this , this applies to all my one month to live writings