Honesty
"The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale"
– Arthur C. Clarke (English astrophysicist & science fiction author in Sri Lanka)
Good thing we don’t grow our noses like Pinocchio’s when we lie. If that happened, the world may just become awfully inhabitable because of our “omnipresent and intertwined hundred-mile noses”.
Honesty meant to deliver truth and nothing but the truth. If questioned of choosing between a lie and a truth in critical circumstances, you would probably answer ‘truth’. But, are you really not lying? Telling the truth is Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada being tortured at court and dealing with like, 5 death calls per day. Truth itself is Jesus Christ persecuted, mocked and crucified on the Cross of Calvary. Bottom line is, are you willing to take the risk?
Defining honesty would mean looking into such aspects such as moral uprightness, respect, integrity, virtue, personal principles and the like. It could be that honesty is the most essential thing to a pastor but most strange to a thief. Honesty can be the way of life of a monk but the greatest obstacle for a lawyer. For me, I define honesty as equivalent to sincerity.
Honesty is more than just “spilling it all out”. It is believing that the unpredictable outcome after you have said a truth will be for the better of everybody. You don’t have to worry of making such stories that will only add to the fiction category. You don’t have to remember and recall what you have said last time if you had said the truth. Being honest frees a person from enormous anxiety building up inside his/her conscience.
Seem easy eh? Being honest is not always beneficial. Like what I mentioned earlier about Christ and Lozada, truth is willingness to march into hell for a heavenly cause. The biggest challenge for us humans is to overcome our fear of rejection, inferiority, humiliation and persecution. Are they not what hinder us to break the silence...
View Full Essay
