Integrity

We are all presented with choices in life. Sometimes those choices are easy; rice or mashed potatoes? Watch the game or the movie? Go out to eat of just grab the left overs?
But sometimes we are presented with complex issues that there are clear right and wrong answers to, and the right answer is the one that is difficult. The one that can cost us a friend, cost us a relationship, can cost us a job....those are the tough choices....but, while difficult, in the end they also allow us to sleep at night. Sure, we can talk our way out of the right thing to do, reasoning that we don't want to hurt the other person, cost our families money, or other thoughts, but in the end, if there is something we know we should do, and we don't do it, it weighs heavy on our very souls.
As we grow up we find ourselves in these predicaments that test us, the easy ones, but at the time they seem to encompass our entire worlds. "Do you know what happened to my vase? It is broken." In this moments as a child we are tested with questions like these, sure the easy path says, deny knowledge, pass the buck, turn the blind eye. And even if we, ourselves are not the guilty ones, being put on the defensive, having to decide, at a moment's notice what answer we are going to give is a choice that marks either a path that will lure us as we grow with its ease to deny guilt or knowledge or will mark us with an ability to accept life's happenings and their consequences.
I find that the child who can say, "Yes, I do know what happened." tends to be the child who faces little difficulty in making friends in life, who tends to have a self assurance about himself that understands that life is messy, and we all make mistakes....and accepts those flaws in others.
On the other hand, the child who tends to deny any knowledge tends to doubt themselves and their belief that others have faith that they can truly succeed. It is that lack of faith in themselves and in those around them that, in the end, causes them to lack the confidence to make the truthful statement, to choose integrity.

We are not able to instill in a child faith in himself, it is a great inner gift that he gives himself. But when it is given, when a child gives themselves permission to have faults, flaws and to actually believe that they can learn from them, it is then that the moral compass with the bearing of integrity takes the correct bearing, steering them on a course into maturity and adulthood.