The Wardman Wire

This is Me .. This is Me .. This is Me .. Ooops !

The fun bit of autobiographies is finding all those juicy details which were hushed up at the time, but are now owned up to in public. Duncan Fletcher’s cricketing memoir hogged the headlines for weeks with his revelations about drunken cricketers and behind-the-scenes rows, and The Blair Years showed us how well hidden Blair had kept the strength of his Christian faith and how devoutly he practiced it.

Shining A Light on The Other Face

We know that there is a hidden side to everyone. What we don’t know is whether that hidden side is better or worse than their public face. I vividly remember business meetings at a certain Somerset shoe company where people were unswervingly polite to each other during a meeting, then as soon as a particular marketing manager left they would be verbally ripped to shreds by those remaining. I had a big problem with this. It made it impossible to take anyone at face value, which in turn makes trust, and true friendship, a no-go area.

The film Jerry Maguire dramatises the same effect magnificently: Maguire (Tom Cruise) writes a radical proposal for his company, everyone claps him on the back and says how great he is; but once he is out of earshot they take bets on how quickly he’ll get fired. At the less glamorous end of the jobs market, in Brassed Off the miners talk tough about a strike but all vote for the redundancy pay.

Who am I ?

It’s even easier to be two-faced on the internet. It’s almost accepted wisdom to blog under a pseudonym, as it gives you greater freedom to say what you want to say. I was offered the chance to post here under an assumed name, thought about it, and said ‘no’.

I think there were a couple of reasons:

• One is a practical one: part of my blogging is for and about my local community (Yeovil in Somerset. Up the Glovers!). The blog is part of an ongoing conversation about stuff which goes on in lots of other ways, with people that I know. So it makes sense to be myself online, as well as in real life.
• The other is the integrity issue. My guess is that if I blogged under a false name, I’d be more tempted to write stuff that I’d not otherwise say. Knowing that I’m accountable in real life for what I say in cyberspace keeps me honest, probably makes me less critical and negative, and doesn’t introduce any of the stress that comes with trying to maintain multiple identities.

Trust and integrity are big issues in pretty much every walk of life. They seem to be a diminishing currency in politics, but vital for the proper functioning of business, and when violated in family and friendships they leave a trail of wreckage. The sons of John Darwin, the Hartlepool canoe man, have spoken publicly about how devastated they are that their own parents decieved them for 5 years.

Public and Private Faces attached to the Same Head

Having been to two Nativity Plays already this week, I’ve been reminded that God deliberately chooses to live a life grounded in a local community. Jesus has integrity. When he starts asking people to follow him, he has surprising success. Why? Because he has integrity. As a carpenter, he’s probably made the wooden boats the fishermen use, or built the table and chair that Matthew the tax collector sits at.

Galilee wasn’t a massive place, Jesus would have been known through his business dealings, and because other local businessmen knew they could trust him, they followed him. He was 30 when he started his ministry, and his actions have already been speaking for 30 years about the kind of man he is, so that when he speaks, people listen, and when he calls, people answer.

At the heart of integrity is being the same person in every situation, with no deceit, no shading of the truth for different audiences, no forked tongue. What’s lived and what is said must match. Whether it’s Richard Dawkins singing the odd Christmas carol, or Al Gore’s gas-guzzling residence, when words and deeds don’t match, we all notice.

And since actions speak louder than words, the background noise of a life lived without integrity drowns out anything important we’re trying to say.

[tags]david keen, integrity, al gore, nativity play[/tags]