Honesty

Last month, Jeff and I were getting our temple recommends renewed and had to answer the question, "are you honest in all your dealings?" Interestingly enough, we both had experiences with honesty.

Mine was a small thing. At a caselot sale, I bought several cases of food. Beans, vegetables, soups, chicken broth, etc. When I checked out, I just put one of each can on the belt and told the cashier how many I had of each one. 12 of each, 18 chicken broth. Easy peasy. But when I got home, I found that I had actually taken 24 chicken broth, and short changed the grocery store about $6.00. I knew I had to go back and make up the difference, and so I did. It took me a few days to get there, but there was never any doubt that I needed to do it. I needed to be able to answer the temple recommend question without hesitation. And I think it was a good lesson for my kids to learn (as they accompanied me back to the store to pay the $6.00 I still owed).

Jeff's was a trickier situation. He had made an order with 3M for supplies for his office (brackets, rubber bands, etc). He thought it was about $1000. But the order didn't make it to his office. Instead, he got a message that 3M would be filling another order for him, as their was a problem with the delivery truck. No big deal, he would just wait for the second order. But in the meantime, he got a phone call. A man told him there were several boxes with his name on them left by the side of the road in west Provo. He drove over to check it out. Not only were his boxes there, there were also boxes for many different professionals in the area (the one I saw was for an eye doctor).

The boxes were open and had been gone through, and some of the stuff was unusable, but most of his order was there. Either the boxes somehow fell off the delivery truck, or were stolen from the warehouse and then abandoned by the side of the road. Jeff picked up his stuff and took it back to his office. He talked to his brothers, who all told him that he should just keep the stuff that was usable, as the shipping company's insurance would be paying for his new order.

But then he found out that the order wasn't a $1000 order. It was a $10,000 order. And that was a much bigger deal. He just couldn't, in good conscience, keep all the stuff without saying anything. And so even though he was tempted to profit by about $10,000, he couldn't do it. He called the rep from 3M and explained the situation. Instead of replacing the entire order, 3M just needed to replace the stuff that was damaged.

Jeff said the same thing--that he was so grateful to be able to answer the honesty question in his temple recommend interview with a clear conscience. And even though the extra supplies would have been really nice, that temple recommend was worth a whole lot more.