JOY

Certain folk, by the way they live, teach us what joy is all about. These joy bearers are not jokesters…Yet they possess the quality rightly called joy. They live that joy as much in the midst of crisis as they do in days of outward celebration. Walking the way of integrity, they carry within them one of the great paradoxes of faith: The person of faith both laments and rejoices mightily.
--Steve Doughty, To Walk in Integrity

Building Up the Body

When persons of integrity speak, they desire not to dominate or humiliate but to aid and bring forth wholeness for everyone. Whether they must share honest words with just one other or with many at once, they act from an inner prayer that has already asked, “Loving One, may what I now share serve to build up all of us.”
--Steve Doughty, To Walk in Integrity

Walk with Integrity

Those who walk with integrity heed the call to repentance. Their longing for wholeness will not let them do anything else. They know their own weaknesses. They understand that even if they have committed themselves to an upright life, the old capacities for lust, greed, sloth, and pride remain. Their honest humility is in no small part born of knowing that they, like all others, have fallen short of the glory of God and, no doubt, will continue to do so.

Those who walk in integrity act with humility. In the midst of crisis, the completeness that speaks through their lives sounds a very different tone in our world than the arrogant boast, the power-asserting threat, and the proud claim to absolute righteousness.

To act with humility is in no way to cower or to hold back. Indeed, when it comes to acting on difficult issues, the humble often become the boldest. Knowing their limitations, they stand free of any need to pretend to be more than they are. Knowing their finite place in relation to the One who reaches toward all, they open to God and others in a way that pride will never allow.

--Steve Doughty, To Walk in Integrity