The theme in the new series that started at church today is “Defining Moments”. It’s a series about Peter the disciple, but today Todd talked about the moments you and I encounter infrequently where we make single decisions that impact the course of our lives.

Similarly, I finished Steinbeck’s “The Winter of our Discontent”, which looks at a small segment of protagonist Ethan Allen Hawley’s life. A store clerk in a small grocery store in a small New England town, Hawley hasn’t lived up to his family’s storied history as important people. In midlife, he is presented with an opportunity to make a few decisions that can give back to he and his family wealth and renewed prominence. Decisions that go against his history of honesty. In the end, in secret he chooses a path of action that benefits him, but that collapses several lives around him. And Steinbeck asks us, the readers- was what he did right? Was what he did worth it?

Character is not cheap. It is hard to keep. It often gets treated as less valuable as we age. We live in a jaded world, where honesty is not really expected. It’s okay to give up and to compromise. To let go of your childhood code for living. It’s expected. You are grown up. Grown ups don’t have to have character. You’ve earned the freedom to “get yours”, however you want to.

And yet, most regular people I know feel hurt when an honest hero collapses, or is revealed to be false or failed.

Ideals are for the young. People morally expect less from others as they get older, though, because disillusionment sets in. Those ideals can’t be real, or maintainable. Come on- we’re all human. You gotta make your own life, your own way.

Until bad choices from good giants come out. See, people cry- no one is good.

We all still really want heroes of the heart, though.

I guess character really does still count, and when people think you have it and you shred it, they feel it.

The “it’s adulthood” clause in ethics is a myth.

Character, at any age, still matters.