Thorough

I’m back! And ready to tackle another Good Character trait. If you’re following this series very closely and actually refer back to the original post, you’ll notice I’m skipping Teachable. This is not because it’s not HIGHLY important. It’s because i’ve blogged on the meaning and vitality of being teachable several times already. This is my best post on it though. Check it out.

After teachable comes Thorough. I love this word and its meaning. I am continually learning how to be thorough and why I shouldn’t try to get away with doing things partially. It’s hard. Because sometimes - no – often we DO get away with it. (But not forever - see Romans 2:16)

By being a leader of several different ministries, I’ve learned that I would rather have two people helping out who are thorough than ten people who aren’t thorough. A person that does a job all the way rather than picking and choosing  parts of the job they’ll actually do is indispensible. Why? They get so much more done. And I don’t have to be concerned about letting them do it.

Why should we be thorough with the jobs and responsibilities we’re given? Because if we’re not thorough, we’ll eventually get stuck…

Stuck? Yep. Stuck. Stuck at your current level of serving and leadership. Because nobody wants to promote the guy who can’t get the WHOLE job done.

And neither does God  – see Luke 12:48 and Matthew 25:21. Clearly God intends to give his servants work, jobs, responsibility. But why would He continue to give it to us if we aren’t faithful with the opportunities we already have?

Mini-sermon: The content gets repetitive after a while, I know. Good character can pretty much be summarized by saying “grow up.” But if you’re like me, you need “grow up” spelled out and repeated over and over again before it seeps into your thick mind. To me, thoroughness is a weed-out quality. Most people have no problem with the initial involvement in ministry or other forms of outreach and work but once they’re involved the question is if they’ll do the job well. Thoroughness is part of doing it well and getting to that next level of involvement. 

Want to know the key to being thorough? Initiative. A thorough person does ALL of the tasks necessary and then takes initiative to make sure there are no loose ends and what they started gets finished. For example, if I offer to help publicize an event and my job is to mail invitations to 50 people, I can choose to barely get the job done by grabbing the invites, sticking stamps on there and then tossing them in the mailbox. OR I can choose to go the extra mile by skimming the addresses to make sure spelling is correct and the zip code numbers are all in order, putting stamps carefully in the appropriate place and asking the leader when exactly the invites should go out in order to give recipients enough time to plan for the event. A thorough person does not assume someone else is doing these extra things.

Be thorough. Take initiative.