Welcome to Las Vegas! I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my luggage to arrive. Honestly it’s almost a work of God that I even made my flight… after leaving late, not finding a taxi immediately for the first time ever, and hitting traffic… I arrived at Midway with 25 minutes until lift-off — and still somehow made it onto the plane! But unfortunately my luggage didn’t. Luckily it did make the next plane about an hour later so I don’t have to wait too long.

So I’m looking forward to the week even though it will be short; only a few days and I’ll probably be pretty focused on the class I’m teaching. But the flight over here did give me opportunity to think about a conversation I had Saturday afternoon with an older, wiser guy I know from church.

At one point he told me a story about a very well-known Christian pastor. This pastor was at one point the president of the SBC, a very large and prestigious organization. When it came to the end of the term he had an opportunity to give a closing speech before the vote for the new president, and he was being followed by one of the candidates (his favorite). Now Leroy told me, in good clean politics you don’t name your successor. So Leroy (who was at this convention) was wondering what this well known pastor would say. Sure enough, at the end of his speech, he said “I want to introduce the man who I think that all of you should vote for to be the new president of the SBC.” Now Leroy didn’t saying that this pastor was an aweful, horrible, wretched person. He just said that he’s learned something from this. It takes a lot of integrity not to abuse influence that you have. It would have been very admirable if this pastor had chosen not to influence the next election. Integrity is a hard game.

After you hear people say “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” for the millionth time it starts to permeate your thinking. Even if you’re not planning to do anything you shouldn’t, you still keep thinking a lot about the things you’re going to have to try hard *not* to do. It just gets ingrained into your head. So that got me thinking while I was on the plane. Integrity is a hard game.

However I’m still playing to win. Not that I always do, always will, or always have. But I still believe in this. I still want to be a person of integrity. Even if nobody ever finds out, I just want to know - when my life reaches its end - that I have lived it well. That even when noone was looking I did the right thing. This is who I want to be.

You don’t have to settle for any less either. Step up.

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