Being Honest

The Church I belong to has 13 Articles of Faith, sort of a summing up of what we believe. The 13th Article of Faith states;

"We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul— We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things."

It's that first bit that I want to talk about. "We believe in being honest" It's something we all believe in right?

I had to go bra shopping the other day, mainly because I had been putting it off and was down to my last bra (and my faithful sports bra) and then it broke, whilst I was doing a fist pump. So I booked an appointment and at the fitting, decided to wear one I was about to purchase and take the others that I wanted to the payment desk. I had a nice chat with the lady who was serving me and pointed out I was wearing one of the bras and ensured she had the tag to scan.

The price she asked me to pay, was not the price I was expecting. It was £30 less and I realised that she hadn't scanned the bra I was wearing, so I pointed it out.

"Wow! You're so honest!" she exclaimed and then spent a minute or two extolling my honesty to her colleague and a fellow shopper.

Err, no.

PippaD at the Beach

Yes, I am honest. I'm just not as honest as she made out, well I am... how can I explain this?

Everyone is honest right?

If you use shop and scan, you scan everything right?

If you found a wallet on the floor, you'd pick it up and return it to the owner or hand it into someone without taking the cash out of it, right?

If someone handed you a wadge of cash and had accidentally given you too much, you'd hand back the extra amount, right?

Sure, we might tell someone that we were running late because of traffic, when really it was because we were watching one last episode on Netflix.

We might tell our children that it's bedtime because we really need an extra half hour to ourselves and the only way we're going to get is if they go to bed early.

We might tell ourselves that one extra cookie won't hurt our diet (what, that's just me?!) and neither is the second extra cookie either.

The point is we are all honest where it counts and I promise never to use that running late excuse again, I'll try to stop eating extra cookies and my children are now far too old for the early bedtime scam.

I promise to be as honest as the lady in the shop thinks I am.