Living Honest Lives While Everyone Lies
In the hit medical drama House MD, the curmudgeon, genius doctor Gregory House solves medical cases while being an unabashed atheist and a truly broken man. While the series would not be commended for its morality, the protagonist does have a phrase that echoes through almost every episode– “Everyone Lies”.
This statement is very accurate, unfortunately.
We all tell lies to protect ourselves or to look out for our best interests. Sometimes they are small shadings of the truth, where we color or leave out parts of the information because we know they won’t play well with the message we desire to put forth.
Politicians build careers around “spin” which is just a fancy way of saying not being fully truthful. Former Presidents have lied directly about things like WMD in Iraq, and whether you could keep your doctor under new health insurance plans, and we now have one going to court because they claim he lied about who won the most recent election.
And yet, honesty is refreshing when heard. I once was on the phone at college longer than 45 minutes, back in the day when those things were monitored because you only had so many lines into the campus and no one had cell phones. When confronted by my hall leader, I told him the truth– I knew I had done it. He reflected back to me that it was refreshing not to have to produce the records and have an argument, and the penalty was less because of the truth.
Honesty is the best policy. It shows respect and it communicates responsibility for the choices you make. Once you walk down that road of deception, you are always having to keep track of your stories, police your language, and fear getting caught.
This is why getting forgiveness and righting wrongs is something that is so valuable, for the longer that you are in the deception or allow a wrong to exist, the more the stress and memory come into play, and the greater the consequences. Again, see politicians!
Solomon warns us about the latter:
The one who lives with integrity lives securely,
Proverbs 10:9
but whoever perverts his ways will be found out.
You can be sure that you’ll eventually be found out, the question is what you are risking with deception. Sometimes what you lose is your reputation– by the time you tell the truth, the party no longer believes that this is now the truth. Sometimes it can be relationships or freedom. The cost can be extremely high.
Better to choose a life of honesty and integrity and live with a clean conscience than a life of lies– no matter how small.
