Reputation is a funny thing. If you think about it, while we refer to it as “one’s reputation”, it doesn’t really belong to anyone. It’s not really an aspect of oneself, so much as society’s view of them.

A person can indirectly influence it, of course. There’s no shortage of examples of people ruining their own reputations, or people having a good reputation because they took care of it. But it’s still entirely possibly for good people to suffer a bad reputation, and for lousy people to be celebrated by their ignorant peers.

Your honor, on the other hand, is entirely your own. It’s between you and God. No smear campaign can sully it, and no PR campaign can inflate it. Society’s views never enter the picture.

I feel like this interplay must have crossed the mind of Susanna in the Book of Daniel. She ends up cornered by wicked men of very high reputation. They threaten that she can choose to let them rape her, or they will ruin her. In other words, both her reputation and life are in peril.

She courageously refuses their “offer”, instead choosing honor. And as promised, she does very nearly meet her demise in disgrace. But fortunately, through Daniel, God was there to save the day.

Daniel might be the superhero of the book, but Susanna was the superhero of chapter 13 (your Bible may vary). She rightly took the honorable path, prepared to lose everything else, but instead was delivered to victory.

I hope all of us, when tested, can similarly embrace honor, even when it seemingly comes at the expense of other things we hold dear.