The Power of Honesty

For a number of months, my wife made the store manager at the grocery store by our house quite uncomfortable. The grocery store carried many magazines at the checkstand, and a number of the magazines showed inappropriate pictures or openly discussed a variety of intimate acts or terms.

One day, she decided to say something about it. “Those magazines are pornographic,” she said calmly but firmly to the cashier, “can you please remove them? This is a place I bring my children and it is not appropriate for those magazines to be here.”

The cashier said that she couldn’t, and that her manager would have to make that decision, so my wife asked if she could call her manager over. When the manager came, my wife repeated her request, stating that the magazines were pornographic and should be removed.

At first, the manager would take the magazines out, but they would be back when my wife went back as the vendor would restock them. Sometimes the manager would put covers over them. Each time my wife returned to the store she would repeat her request, reaffirming that the magazines were pornographic in nature and should not be there.

Ultimately, the store stopped carrying those magazines. While they tried to keep them for a time, they ultimately could not reconcile their actions when confronted with a person simply speaking truth to them.

My wife did not have to yell, be uncivil, or be rude. She simply stated what was true, and it had an impact.

When we speak with integrity, we state what is true, whether or not it is difficult or socially acceptable to do so. Often, bad things become more acceptable in society simply because we remain too quiet on things.

For example, after my wife’s experience at the grocery store, I decided that I needed to speak up more too. At the time, there was a billboard on our local freeway that showed a woman wearing almost nothing, posed in a suggestive fashion. I wrote down the billboard number and called the billboard company to let them know that I felt the billboard was not appropriate.

The billboard company took my call very seriously. The employee on the other end stated that they are very careful to only advertise things that are acceptable to the community, so community complaints mattered. However, he told me that I was the only person that had called on that billboard. Billboards that were truly offensive to the community, he said, usually got at least 10 or 20 calls.

I thought about that quite a bit. Countless parents were driving by this billboard with their children, many of whom wanted to teach their children to live a moral and chaste life. Yet, none of them had called. If only 10 or 20 had called, the billboard company would have removed the billboard.

Think about that. Only a handful of us can shape the billboards that we see up and down the freeway. Do we exercise our influence, or simply sit idle, assuming we have no influence?

I believe that we often underestimate the power of simply speaking truth. Our words, when spoken truthfully and with integrity, shape ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nation.

To me, integrity implies speaking up when it is not easy to do so. It may take a few minutes to call a billboard company, it may take extra time at the grocery store, and it may require having a conversation that is uncomfortable. If we do not do so though, good is driven out by the lewd, profane, and inappropriate conduct that otherwise speaks so loudly. Our world has enough of that, and our integrity and conversations based on our integrity can give life in our community to the values we hold.

God gave all of us the ability to communicate and share truth. It is a strong power, one that we each can utilize to improve the world around us. Speaking with integrity means, to me, speaking words that conform to the things we believe in and seek to have in our lives. 

If I believe something is wrong, I need to have the integrity to share why and share that I believe it is wrong. Otherwise, the wrong will remain. But, if I do my part, while it will not always immediately change things, the truth will impact and shape our world for the better, just as my wife helped in getting pornographic magazines removed from the grocery store by our house.