Reading my previous entry entitled The Irony of Being a Teacher will provide the reader with the context needed to understand this blog.
Although some may think that I did the right thing by telling the young man that my car door nicked his truck, this experience was actually a wake-up call for me. I have reflected upon it several times since and have given the prior blog as my spiritual thought in each of the accounting classes I teach. The thing that bothers about my response to the experience, is that it wasn't made instinctively. Rather, I conducted a mental analysis of the situation before coming to the conclusion that I must tell the owner of the truck what I had done. The fact that fear entered my heart was most instructive. I should have reflexively set out to find the owner of the truck; that should have been my first and only thought Hence, my final decision was right, but the process of arriving at it was all wrong!
I have been faced with much larger and more important decisions involving integrity and, in each case, responded appropriately. Hence, I thought I had made the decision to be honest long ago. Yet, when faced with the events of last Monday evening, I found myself assessing whether I should be honest. Of course, I should! Why should a matter, small in comparison, demand so much emotional, spiritual, and intellectual capital? That's the question that has been tormenting me since the incident.
Elder Neal A. Maxwell, a prior member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, addressed the subject of making decisions and concluded that some decisions need to be made only once. Once made, we should allow our righteous reflexes to make any subsequent choices tied to that decision:Now, since we are not always free to choose just when and how all of life’s interactions will occur, we are nevertheless free to choose our responses to these moments. Since we can’t compute beforehand all our responses, it becomes vital to set our course as immortals on the basis of immortal principles to be applied as reflexively as possible. Besides, there may be no time in which to ponder how we will respond anyway. If, for example, one determines that he will keep the seventh commandment, then his applying this fixed principle will result in temptations either being deliberately avoided in the first place or in being quickly deflected. All of this can be achieved without great thought, risk, or needless anxiety. In fact, I would go so far as to say to you tonight, my brothers and sisters, that if we are truly attached to immortal principles, some decisions need to be made only once, really, and then righteous reflexes can do the rest. Absent such fixed determinations, however, one can be tossed to and fro by temptations that then require case-by-case agonizing. (Maxwell, Neal A., The Pathway of Discipleship, January 4, 1998).
Elder Maxwell was so right! . . . and now I am embarrassed of all my mental gyrations described in my prior blog in coming to the decision to be honest.
In an interesting article published in the Deseret News National Edition on Wednesday, March 12 2014, entitled "What makes us lie and cheat and what we can do about it", reporter Sara Israelsen-Hartley wrote regarding her interview of Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and author of "The Honest Truth about Dishonesty." One aspect of the interview that was of significant interest to me was the Dr. Ariely's comment that "when you make decisions, even if you make the right decision, the temptation itself created a cost." Continuing, he explained:
Imagine that your morning is full of temptation: muffin, croissant, Facebook, YouTube, saying something nasty to your boss, the morning is just full of temptation. And you've been able to resist [all of them;], good for you, but by the time you've resisted all of them, you've already paid the price. And the price you've paid is the price of depletion. So temptation is tough to deal with, but temptation has also this consequential cost that comes later that we don't see. You could be a great person overcoming temptation, but you'd be much better off not facing this temptation to start with.
Resisting temptation can drain the soul. Think of the torment that is experienced by the man who, because of weakly viewing pornography, weekly covers the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping, and with crying out insomuch that the Lord regardeth not the offering any more, or receiveth it with good will at the man's hand (see Malachi 2:13). What prevents this desolation and depletion of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual capital is "setting our course as immortals on the basis of immortal principles to be applied as reflexively as possible."
As I concluded evaluating what happened Monday evening, my mind was drawn to Moses 5:23, wherein, the Lord instructed Cain that the distance between sin and safety is the width of a door. Confronting my integrity this week would have been far more enriching if, when I opened the car door, I kept the door to temptation closed. Developing our spiritual reflexes to think the right thing saves us from having to pay the price of resisting temptation over and over and over . . ..
