Honesty is definitely a very important value. Honesty, or the lack thereof, can make or break a marriage, a company, a friendship, a team …
I was reading a book one day about a man and his contemplations as to why he was booted out from a prominent position in a company he had worked for for a long time. Everything was going so well and there were no apparent reasons for him to lose that job. Had he missed something? Was he so involved in his own world that he couldn’t see the proverbial ‘handwriting on the wall’? This situation caused him to sit down and take stock of his life and everything he believed in and had fought for (a good thing to do every decade or so…). As I was internalising the text of the personal conclusions of this desperate man, I came across a quote that very much spoke to me. It said, ‘Every truth taken to an extreme becomes error.’ Since then, this citation has become the touchstone of my personal philosophy on just about everything. Back to honesty. Is honesty always the best policy? I would say that in business dealings, children towards their parents, 99% yes (since we don’t know everything, to say 100% could lead to an erroneous statement). But what about relationships? A friend of mine praised his wife to me one time. He said she was ‘brilliant’ because one day she said to him, ‘You really don’t have to always say everything you think!” or in other words, the ‘honest’ word of truth spoken in the wrong time, place, and/or spirit can hurt and kill more than help and heal. Sometime, the best way to tell the truth is even to say nothing at all as there is much more truth in silence than in all that is uttered. As an application, I’d like to share a very appropriate version of the biblical story of Noah and his family. The biblical text tells us that after the flood, Noah planted a vineyard, got drank, and that one of his sons, Ham, found him naked in his tent. We are then told that the first thing he did was to tell Shem and Japheth, his brothers, who in order to protect the dignity of their father, walked in the tent backward (so not to lay eyes upon him) and covered him with a blanket. As a result, Noah cursed Ham’s grandson and blessed his two brothers, Why? Because Ham publicly exposed his father’s drunken state, while his brothers covered his shame. It is from this understanding of the story that this famous proverb may come from, ‘Whoever covers an offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends. (King Solomon in Proverbs 17:9)
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