Read a good book recently by Senator John McCain and Mark Salter: Hard Call: great decisions and the extraordinary people who made them.   In it McCain and Salter explore the lives and decisions of twenty people divided into six areas that the authors see as critical in making the “hard call.”  The six areas are awareness, foresight, timing, confidence, humility, and inspiration.  The lives and stories shared capture well each of the qualities identified. 

A valuable surprise, however, comes in the Afterword.  Senator McCain shares a mea culpa during his 2000 run for president.  In his own words,

I took a position I knew to be wrong on a controversial public issue that had a moral component because I thought it might help me win the primary in the state the issue concerned.  That…I regretted.  For in addition to the fact that it did me little political good, it caused me to be ashamed of myself, and it’s a little late in life to bear that kind of burden.

…I lacked humility and an inspiration to some purpose higher than self interest, which proved the cause of my error….I have learned by painful experience…that those two are the most important qualities of a good decision, and all the more so when it is a hard decision.

“Humility and an inspiration to some purpose higher than self interest” are key notes in the life of integrity. 

McCain and Salter define humility as “the quality of a decision that has as its primary objective the well being of others” (p. 285.)   Humility aims primarily not to benefit self but others.  It is not a quality of self-abasement, but, in the words of Paul, “in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (Phil. 2:3).

I really like how they define inspiration:

The quality of inspiration we refer to is found in those decisions whose authors have felt beckoned by a sense of duty or the demands of justice simply to do what is right, who use just means to secure just ends; and who are prepared to suffer whatever price they incur for their faithfulness.  They are decisions made by those who feel and act upon a perceived moral obligation to a cause, to their conscience, or to God.  They are rare in history and sublime in the eyes of humanity.  They summon their witnesses to greatness as they reaffirm the potential within us all to rise above our nature and serve a cause greater than our self-interest.

Very cool.  Put these notions of humility and inspiration together and you have the power of integrity.  We are not the center of all that is, and, truth be told, not even the center of what we are doing, of what we are about.  Christ alone has that place.  If we can be mindful of the simple truth that others are at least as significant as ourselves, and that our Christ-centered actions always hold the potential to "lift others to greatness" we have a chance to be a part of something far bigger than ourselves, a chance to participate in a glory not our own but a glory in which we share.  

Integrity takes root in this paradox of God's divine partnership with humanity.  On the one hand, we really are not all that important in the great scheme of things.  We really can relax and simply be who we are with all our burdens, confusions, foibles and foolishness.  On the other hand, the miracles God works through  surrendered hearts reveals Him and inspires awe and wonder, not least in ourselves.

Integrity is not a work or our own doing.  It is the simple fruit of living from what God can do with one more forgiven sinner.

Kyle Phillips