When I Was Thirteen

Sitting at my local morning bagel and coffee hole, yesterday morning, I overheard a conversation between a mother and her two daughters which took me back to a seventh grade history classroom and confronted by the history teacher, Mrs. Hurley.  From my ease dropping at the next table, I gathered that one of the daughters had been in the principal’s office just as I had been at age thirteen for the same misdemeanor.  Apparently this young lady was  gathering things to leave for an afternoon math competition when a friend realized she had left her permission slip on the kitchen counter at home.  She had called her mom, but there was no answer and no time to track her down before the bus left with or without them.  So they went into the girl's bathroom and forged her mom's name on another slip.  As she was in the act the middle school administrator walked in, realized what they were doing, and sent both to the principal's office. 

At the overhearing, it was like a rolling film strip of the most horrible day in my life as a middle school student.  I discovered that waiting for the principal is just as frightening as standing accused before him, even as I silently prepared my convincingly innocent rationale for this seemingly guilty-looking misdeed.  At the top of my list was the simple fact that my mom had already given her permission to do whatever I was going to do!  It wasn't as if I was lying about anything—per se.  No one got hurt; no parental rights were trumped.  For all practical purposes, I was convinced—and ready to convince the principal—that I didn't technically do anything wrong, that it was really only a matter of a dislocated piece of paper.  But he came in without a desire to hear my defense.  He simply said, "I know the meaning of the word integrity.  What does it mean to you, Billy?"

My day in the principal's office stands out as the day I started to see that integrity is not something I create for other people, but something given and entrusted by God, something I mold with every decision.  Before his question, I had never considered my integrity to be something I had a role in creating or shaping nor did I see it as something that shaped me.  It was always in my mind an either/or sort of behavior: either you followed the rules, or you did not.  But here, something other than obedience and technicalities was placed before me.  Integrity had a definition, yes, but what it became in my hands was something else entirely.  Would I mold it—and myself—into a check list of rationalized rules of thumb, where so long as "no one gets hurt" I have made a fine decision?  Or would integrity be forged in such way, as if shaping metal in the fires of decision, that in turn I myself am changed, forged by the very decisions I have made?   

C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, "People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing.' I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before." In other words, the decisions I make that define my integrity simultaneously define—and refine—me.  Such a description posits a perspective similar to the psalmist's on choosing the laws of God.  Singing of these laws, the psalmist describes something less like a proper collection of do's and don'ts and more like the choosing of light and life—things we can claim and foster, and by which find ourselves changed by the one who first called light into existence.  Writes the psalmist, "The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul.  The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple.  The precepts of the LORD are right, giving joy to the heart.  The commands of the LORD are radiant, giving light to the eyes" Psalm19:7-8.  Whatever the choices I make, I am left differently than I was before.

My prayer and desire, as a grandfather of a fourteen, twelve, ten, and six year olds, especially, is to live a  transformational quality in the time I am given, to the decisions I make, and the kingdom I am either walking further into or farther from.  Lewis continues, "[W]ith all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.  To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power.  To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.  Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other." That is to say, in this world of choices, I am forging in the fires of earthly decision an identity that is either storing up the treasures of heaven or hording away the qualities of something far less.

I ask myself, this early morning, “Bill, what if you really become determine that what you are fostering here on earth, you will discover more of in heaven?  Will it change the way I make decisions everyday for the rest of my life?   That's my aim.