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Blood Money

Blog / Produced by The High Calling
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One of the most powerful lessons I've learned on integrity came as a result of deceit.

Years ago, I spent a couple of days and one night as a homeless woman, with a total of one quarter to my name—for a graduate school assignment, I should add. I already owned drawers full of old jeans and T-shirts, so the wardrobe was no problem. And as I talked with other women at the Salvation Army shelter that night, I never needed to lie about who I was, just let them assume—and keep quiet about the job I held or the safety nets of education and family to break my fall should I ever lose that job.

A product of the suburban middle class, my assumptions about integrity in the workplace had to that point involved the simple, obvious “Thou Shalt Nots.” Thou shalt not embezzle funds, waste company time, use a corporate credit card for Caribbean cruises. I don't suppose I'd ever thought of integrity as assertive or risky. Until Rhonda.

She was a pretty young woman with a restraining order that provided little actual protection from her abusive husband. Rhonda began confiding in me. She told me about her flight from home, the children she'd secretly sent on a bus to her parents' house, and her determination to find work, fast, so she could reclaim her children. She assumed we were in similarly desperate circumstances—and no doubt I looked how I felt: unwell—because I was feeling physically ill with the part I was playing and feared for her safety.

We shared breakfast at the shelter and traded dreams for the future. She asked if I had any money. I didn't. Not on me, at least.

So without hesitation, she offered to give me the only money she had in the world, the money she'd earned by selling her own blood the previous day. Giving it to me, a virtual stranger, because I was homeless and desperate like her, she assumed, and because she had it to give.

If the definition of integrity is how one behaves when no one is looking, then Rhonda set a new standard for me. Because no one was watching but me, just another homeless woman like her. She had nothing to gain from helping me, and everything to lose. She offered to help only because, she explained, it was the right thing to do. Because God had provided a way for her to earn money, a fortune of fifteen dollars, and that meant she could share with me.

“God sees us,” she told me. “God knows we need help. Here … let me help you with this.”

She tried to press bills in my palm. She would trust me, she said, to pay her back when I could. There I stood, stunned, being offered abundance from the heart and the pocket—the actual blood—of an abused homeless woman.

I didn't take the money she offered. It seemed safer to risk hurting her feelings by insisting I couldn't accept it than to risk not being able to find her again and pay her back the money she needed to eat, to survive. She shook her head, smiling a little, assuming it was pride that made me gently close her fingers back over the bills she held out to me. So she hugged me, and made me promise to avoid particular streets, and to meet her later that day. She, the petite, destitute young woman on the run from a brute of a husband, wanted to be sure I was safe.

I'd like to tell you that I was invaluable to Rhonda later, back when I'd returned to my middle-class graduate student life, and that through my assistance, she landed the job of her dreams and regained her kids and now lives in a neatly kept bungalow with daisies at the front door, and that I visit her daily. The truth is that I never found my friend again. It's likely she heard from or spotted her husband and she'd had to flee, or that he'd gone to threaten her children and she'd had to find bus fare to go protect those she loved.

In any case, I was of absolutely no help to her. Except that I prayed for her and still do. Unfinished business is what that memory feels like to me as I pray. She, though, continues to help me: In making me live with a perpetually uncomfortable sense of unfinished business about others' pain around me, an uneasiness that nudges me out of my selfish little shell just when I'd rather not be bothered with someone else's misfortunes.

I may have refused to take the money she offered, but I did take much from her: the lessons her life taught.

All these years later, I understand how the demands of professional life often insist we watch bottom lines and marketing results. But I still need to hear over and over the lesson Rhonda lived out, about risk and real concern for doing what's right—not just in theory, but in the hard, practical Now. About how we behave when we think no one of consequence is watching and there's nothing to gain in caring about someone else's well-being. About what God sees of who we are and what we're about: integrity.

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