Integrity

Elder Richard J. Maynes' talk, Earning the Trust of the Lord and Your Family, focussed largely on trust, but for this blog post, I'd like to focus on another important trait: Integrity. Elder Maynes said that "trust is built on integrity," and that "Being a man of integrity simply means your intentions, as well as your actions, are pure and righteous in all aspects of your life, both in public and in private."

That's a pretty good definition. When I looked Integrity up on Google, the first definition for it is "the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness." It comes from the Latin word Integer, meaning Intact or Whole.

Looking at other definitions of Integrity and of a related word, Integral, I found some interesting connections. Integrity can also be defined as "the state of being whole and undivided" and/or "the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction." Similarly, one definition of Integral is "having or containing all parts that are necessary to be complete."

So, Integrity suggests a good moral character with an underlying idea of being whole, intact, unified, and complete.

These definitions point us toward the perfection we hope to eventually attain.

Of course, having a good moral character is an essential part of perfection, but so is having a body, as we've explored earlier with our (mostly one-sided) discussion about Jesus' commands to be perfect.

Our perfection also depends on our spirits and bodies being unified, not just in being inseparably attached to each other, but also in purpose. To be perfect, we must make our natural appetites subject to our spirits.

We also must be undivided ourselves, having firmly decided which of our two most influence spiritual brothers we are going to follow. And we must be intact, unblemished by sin.

Thus, in many more ways than one, Integrity helps to define Perfection. To have a full measure of integrity is to be perfect. And, until we attain that perfection, integrity can serve as an understandable and largely achievable goal to strive for. We can hardly wrap our heads around how to be perfect, but we can easily understand how to have integrity, especially with the definitions above. It's still a lofty goal to strive for, but at least we can understand it. And once we achieve integrity in almost every sense of the word, we will effectively have become perfect. Perfection is the term the Lord has chosen to describe our ultimate goal, but to help myself understand what He meant by that, I might mentally substitute the term Integrity.