I am constantly stunned by the way people can decipher my values without me having to preach a thing.

Action is the true language of values. But I didn’t always know that. College is the time when we’re forced to take inventory of those values and I did. After that, I was constantly ready to verbalize them to anyone who’d listen.

But one day I came across a student who did the same thing to me and I realized I was looking into an obnoxious mirror. From that day forward, I decided that time used for talking about my values could be better spent embodying them.

Sometimes religious people neglect this principle. Here’s one of my pet peeves: I’ll be talking to a fellow person of faith about someone who has just screwed me over or simply been a jerk.

The person’s response, “Well, he just doesn’t have God in his life.” Maybe he did or maybe he didn’t. Frankly, I’ve met individuals who didn’t have God in their lives who were a lot nicer than many who do. I E-mailed Peter Bosque, my parish priest about this and he concurred.

“It is less holier to say ‘I believe in God’ than to love as one who does,” he wrote.I pray those individuals will find God, but I’m more impressed by their noble actions than by a believer’s noble platitudes. The people cutting in line at “Lord of the Rings” were just as virtuous as those doing it at “The Passion of the Christ.”

Living your values often means you get excluded from juicy conversations because others are afraid of what you might be thinking. But that means that what you think matters to them. It can feed off of you and develop other values you never gave much thought.

A few months ago at work, I got into a conversation with a manager about hot actresses. Actress Kirstin Dunst came up and I commented that she had a “nice rack.” It wasn’t exactly how I normally talked but seemed harmless and I was relieved to not be treated like a humorless puritan.

Later that night, the manager came out from the office as I finished vacuuming, a task neglected by most employees because of lax supervision, and said: “Andy, I just wanted to say that every time I close with you and hear you vacuuming, it makes me not want to cut corners while I’m back there doing the deposit. Your integrity makes me want to have integrity.”

I felt awkward and didn’t know how to respond. “Good … cool,” I muttered.

He nodded and headed back to the office. I stood in place feeling overwhelmed because I hadn’t asked for such a responsibility. I recounted the past six hours and stopped on that Dunst conversation.

“Wait, a rack is an object,” I thought. “Oh, I guess I objectified a woman.” Then I realized that if he viewed me as someone with integrity to emulate, I taught him that it was OK to objectify women.

We’re not what we say or think we are; we are only what we do. That scares me because it means I’m nowhere near the person I should be. I’d write more, but I need to get back to living my values instead of preaching them to you.