Originally published in the Unashamedly Ethical newsletter, September 2024.
“I strive to commit to be faithful to my family relationships.”
It is possible to build an impressive public reputation and still fail the people at home.
We have all seen it. The leader admired at work whose children barely know them. The person who keeps every promise to a client and breaks every promise to a spouse. The respected community figure who is a different person behind the front door.
Our second commitment refuses that split. It says that integrity does not stop at the office door. If anything, home is where it is tested most honestly, because it is where there is no audience to perform for.
What faithfulness asks of us
Faithfulness is more than staying. It is keeping our word to the people closest to us. It is being present, not only physically but attentively. It is being the same person at the kitchen table as we are in the boardroom.
It means honouring commitments that nobody will ever audit: the school play we said we would attend, the call we promised to return, the difficult conversation we have been avoiding for months.
It also means repair. Every family will experience failure. Faithfulness is not the absence of mistakes. It is the willingness to own them, apologise and try again.
Families take many shapes
In South Africa, family seldom looks like a single picture. Many children are raised by grandparents. Many households include aunts, cousins and siblings who carry one another. Many parents work far from home to provide for the people they love.
This commitment applies to all of these relationships. It is not about a particular family structure. It is about the quality of our faithfulness to whoever our family is.
What faithfulness is not
There is an important boundary here.
Faithfulness is not loyalty that covers up wrongdoing. Protecting a relative from accountability, appointing family members because they are family, or keeping silent about harm in the name of “family loyalty” is not faithfulness. It is a distortion of it.
And faithfulness never requires anyone to remain in harm’s way. Being faithful to our family relationships includes protecting the people in them.
The first classroom
Family is where most of us first learnt what a promise means. We learnt whether adults could be trusted to do what they said. We learnt how conflict is handled, how people are spoken to when tempers run high, and whether honesty is safe.
Children do not learn ethics from what we tell them. They learn it from what they watch.
When they see us keep our word at home, they learn that integrity is real. When they see us say one thing and do another, they learn that values are something adults talk about rather than live.
That is why this commitment reaches far beyond our own households. The integrity of our workplaces, institutions and communities is shaped, in the end, by what is learnt around ordinary family tables.
Perhaps faithfulness starts with one small promise at home that we have been postponing. It matters more than we think.
If you are ready to make this commitment your own, read all ten and sign at unashamedlyethical.com/commitment.
Yours in ethics,
Ilene Power