Truth Telling
TRUTH TELLING
I built a house in New Hampshire a few years ago. The bulldozing for the foundation had barely begun when a shiny car drove up and out stepped a man dressed in very clean work clothes. He took off his hard hat and introduced himself as “the best gosh-dam well-driller in the whole North Country.” I needed a well, and he drilled it and did a good job. After that he would drop by whenever he had work in the neighborhood. The coffee I gave him was a small price to pay to hear him talk. He held opinions about everything and was afraid of nothing and nobody. And he certainly knew how to tell a story. I listened enthralled. He had his own way of running a business (“We need your business—our business is going in the hole” was his motto, painted on the side of his drilling rigs) and his own code of ethics, both of which worked fine for him.
“I’ve worked for people, and I’m not lying to you,” he said one day. “You can call my wife right up and she’ll go over the checkbook, and I’ll bet you over the last five years there’s been fifteen people I’ve gone and drilled a well for and give ’em two percent off if they pay in ten days. Well, like the money’d be coming from the bank or something and it might go thirty days and the people were honest, they wouldn’t take their two percent and I d send it back. Now how many guys will send back money once they get it? Like, it’d be a two-thousand-dollar job and that d be, what, forty dollars? Yeah. You can ask my wife and she’ll show you the checkbook. Because I just don’t do things that way, I mean that, life’s too short.
“Now let’s say you’re in business. You’re doin’ something so let’s say I go and say, ‘Well, heck, don’t hire Betty Elliot, she don’t know what she’s doin’.’ Well, all right, they may go and hire you anyway and you may do the best job in the world. Now isn’t that gonna make me look stupid? Sometimes I go to look at a job and a guy’ll say to me he can get somebody else to drill his well for six dollars a foot when I’m asking seven. I’ll say to him, ‘You know I didn’t come up here to give you an education about my competition, I never give ’em a thought. All I know is I know what I’m doin’ and I’ve got something to show for it. If you need this well drilled I can drill it. As far as I’m concerned half my competition stinks, but if you want to ask me to come here to see you about a well I’m not comin’ here to run down my competition because the idea of it is you might hire one of my competitors and he might do a wonderful job and then you can say, “Well, I don’t know what on earth he was shootin’ off his mouth about.”’ I can’t see that kind of business, can you? Life’s too short.
“But the way I look at life is that no matter who it is—so long as they’re somewheres near square—everybody’s gotta get a living. I mean I’m not planning to drill all the wells, but so what if I don’t? I do what I can, and I do it good. The other guy’s gotta eat, he’s got a wife and kids, too, so what’s the difference?
“I never charge anything for setting up the rig, either. A lot of guys, they want three hundred dollars for setting up and they want their money the day they’re done drillin’, but then if you got to put the pump in and there’s something wrong, well, what’re you gonna do? You’ve had it, and you’ve got to stop payment on a check, you gotta work fast. But I don’t do things that way. I’m not interested in it. But you’ve gotta go out there and do something and life is short. If you gotta be crooked on everything you do and you can’t look people in the face, you know full well they think you’re a crook and it’s a pretty short world to be doin’ that all the time, I would say.”
It is a short world, and it doesn’t take more brains than most of us have to figure out that honesty is a good thing if it helps business and keeps us from looking too stupid. It’s the best policy, obviously, but it isn’t usually much more than that. It’s one of those things, along with eating and dieting, taxation, religion, and loving your neighbor, that we all feel can be carried too far. Too far, that is, if the matter concerns ourselves.
“The people in your organization are certainly the most honest bunch I’ve ever seen,” a woman said to a friend of mine.
“Honest? How do you mean?”
“Well, honest about each other.”
We can stand a lot of honesty that concerns other people, and we jump to the defense of protesters so long as they’re protesting things for which we’re not directly responsible. But we are marvelously uncritical and generous when it comes right down to the nitty-gritty of our private lives. You won’t catch us carrying things to extremes there.
People do overeat, but it hasn’t been my problem. Dieting, on the other hand, can be carried too far and that piece of pie does look delicious. As for religion, a good thing, of course—an excellent thing if you don’t get too much of it at once. And I’m willing to pay my taxes. I understand that the country can’t run without them, but this bill, now. . . .Loving my neighbor? I do. But how far do you think a person ought to be expected to go anyhow?
At a camp where my husband worked for several summers the counselors had to grade each camper on certain character traits. Was he, for example, exceptionally, moderately, or fairly honest?
A man in Elmhurst, Illinois, found two Brinks money bags containing $183,000. He threw them, unopened, into the trunk of his car and for four days wondered what to do with them. (He mentioned later that he did not even think to tell his wife. I think she would have known what to do.)
“I didn’t know it was money,” he told newsmen. “I thought it might be mail. I forgot about them until I began reading stories in the paper. Then I realized what I had. I had always daydreamed about finding a lot of money, but it became a reality and things changed. I had to call.”
Asked why he didn’t break the seals on the bags he said, “You don’t break seals on people’s parcels. That would muddle things considerably. I’m an honest man within reasonable limits.”
The Brinks company awarded him $18,000 for his honesty, which raises the question of whether his was, in fact, a “reasonable” honesty, for if he had been dishonest he might possibly have succeeded in keeping the $183,000 for himself, along with, at the very least, some sleepless nights.
It is a short world, and if this is the only world, we can play it like a game—fair and somewhere near square. That ought to be good enough, and a man ought to be allowed to get what he’s willing to pay for.
But what about gaining the whole world and losing your own soul? Those words apply to another world altogether, the long one, where the rules are not the same at all, where things like poverty and meekness and sorrow and hunger and purity of heart lead to happiness. Then, too, the Rule Book has things about living “honestly in all things,” “providing for honest things, not only in the sight of the Lord, but also in the sight of men,” and (who can stand up to this one?) about the Lord’s desiring “truth in the inward parts.” It is what I would have to call an unreasonable honesty, beyond any of us, and we have to call out, “Lord, save me!” And that is what he does.
* * *
Recently I met a friend for lunch whom I had not seen for twenty years. As I approached the restaurant I was thinking the usual thoughts: Will she have changed much? Will I recognize her? Will we be able to find things to talk about?
I saw her as soon as I got there, and I knew that if I said, “Why, Helen, you haven’t changed a bit!” it would be a bald lie. The truth was that Helen was beautiful now. She had never been a beauty in college. The years and her experiences (some of them of a kind of suffering I knew nothing about) had given her a deep womanliness, a kind of tender strength. Her eyes glowed, there was passion about her mouth, and the lines of her face revealed a strength of character she could not have had when she was a college student. So, instead of the usual pleasantries, I simply started with the truth. I told her what I saw in her face. Of course she was taken aback, but I am sure that this unorthodox beginning did not render further conversation more difficult. We were able to get down to the real things in life, things that matter and that had changed us both, rather than spending an hour on the ages of our children, their mates and careers, and our latest diets and recipes.
We all know that the truth often hurts. We use this cliché as a defense for having hurt someone, and sometimes it is indeed necessary to tell this kind of truth. But there is truth which does not hurt—truth which encourages and surprises with delight and gratitude. What if a teacher sees that a colleague of hers has succeeded in breaking down the resistance of a pupil who has been the despair of the other teachers, the talk of the faculty lunchroom? The change in the student is noticed, a sigh of relief is heaved, but who goes to the teacher herself and says, “Thanks! You’ve done what the rest of us couldn’t do!” How many are free enough from themselves to recognize the worth of others and to speak of it honestly?
A lady who is a good many years older than I tells me often of the aunt who was a mother to her throughout her childhood. “Auntie” impressed her with the need to tell the truth—the welcome kind—and she would add emphatically, “Tell them now. ” My friend calls me on the telephone—sometimes to thank me for a note or a little gift, sometimes to tell me what my friendship means to her.
“You remember what Auntie always said,” she will say, “so, I’m telling you now.” There would be no way for me to exaggerate how she has cheered and helped me.
I was talking with a lady who had been a missionary for forty years, and I noticed that she had exceptionally lovely hands. “Has anyone ever told you your hands are beautiful?” I asked. The dear soul was so flustered one might have thought I had committed an indecency. She looked at her hands in amazement.
“Why . . . why no. I don’t think anyone ever has!” But she saw that I meant it, and she had the grace to hear the truth. She said thank you.
“Tell it like it is,” is the watchword today. But suppose it’s lovely? Suppose it’s actually beautiful? C. S. Lewis said that the most fatal of all nonconductors is embarrassment. It seems to me that life is all too short to let embarrassment deprive us and our friends of the pleasure of telling the happy truth. Suppose the boy who does your lawn does it fast, trims it perfectly, and takes care of the tools? Suppose the clerk who waits on you happens to be the most gracious one you’ve ever encountered? Suppose even that your husband—when you stop for once to look at him, to think about him as a person and as a man—seems to you to be the best man you know?
Tell them.
Tell them now.