Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

A sluggard’s appetite is never filled,
    but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.

• Proverbs 13:4

The light of the righteous shines brightly,
    but the lamp of the wicked is snuffed out.

• Proverbs 13:9

Sluggards do not plow in season;
    so at harvest time they look but find nothing.

• Proverb 20:4

“Few indeed are those who finish what they start-and even fewer do a complete job of it when they do finish a task.
“Now I’m not referring to a neurotic fanaticism of extreme, some impractical and unbalanced preoccupation with mundane details. That’s the trees-in-the-forest syndrome, and that’s not what I’m talking about.
“I’m talking about the rare but beautiful experience of carrying out a responsibility to its completion.”

• Charles R. Swindoll, The Finishing Touch (Devotion for week 44, Monday)

He goes on to give four examples of ordinary tasks that are often left incomplete.

1. Completing a course of instruction.  I remember my advanced engineer officer course.  I took most of it by correspondence, but I went to a two-week reserve training program.  My “advisor” only saw me at the middle of the second week and gave me a yawning review.  Everyone in the course was average, everyone got the same efficiency report.  He had never looked at the grades.  Whether the class was on road design or construction management or estimating for building a house, I had the highest grade on every exam.  I challenged the fellow captain (O-3) to do his job and get back to me.  He came by my desk in a break in class the next day and asked if I would like to sign my evaluation for the course.  He had rewritten his evaluation to reflect that I was driven to complete the task at hand and achieved that goal by having the highest grades on every exam.
2. Completing a project at home.  I have known people who have half of a motorcycle in their garage.  They do not consider all their work so far to be wasted, but they still cannot ride the motorcycle.  The money and time remain wasted until you enjoy the fruits of your labor.
3. Completion in an occupation.  Project managers must complete their task or it simply is not done, but here we can look at quality.  Is the finished project really “finished” to the point of passing a white glove test?  I had a very unreasonable battalion operations officer who said he wanted to eat off the floor at my project site.  My men were hammering out concrete walls.  The dust flew everywhere.  But I had a sergeant who had an idea.  He posted a guard at the entrance of the kaserne (a barracks area in Germany).  He radioed the construction site upon seeing the operations officer or his team.  The floors had been covered in tarps and when the operations officer arrived for an inspection, or any of his men, work was halted and my men barely had time to roll up the tarps.  When asked why all the tarps, the sergeant or I said that we stored our tools and construction materials on the tarps for easy access.  They never once unrolled the tarps to see a half-inch layer of concrete dust on the tarps.  The job was completed on time, under budget, and our construction site cleanliness was among the best in the battalion, with one of the messiest jobs.
4. Everyday duties.  This is confession time for a very tired widower.  I will have breakfast or lunch and place the dirty dishes in the sink.  Not much since I cook for one.  Then at suppertime, I cook something more elaborate.  I use a pot or two and a frying pan.  I wash the dishes afterwards, but then I am fighting for time in completing the writing of an essay or Bible study lesson.  So, I might leave a pot soaking in hot soapy water.  And I might not notice until the next day.

I used the one failure, and I could have listed others, to illustrate that none of us are perfect.

But one thing that always drives me is doing a quality project on time.  And to keep the budget concerns in the forefront, I personally took work home with me to keep the completion rate as high as possible.

I have known people who were satisfied with being about halfway completed on everything they did.  They knew the boss or the customer would want something changed, so why complete it?  But most customer requests for change never came until the job was thought to be complete.  And if you have eaten up all the budget for the project getting half of it done, you are in for some long unpaid nights with an angry big boss, a worried boss (in that he did not manage your efforts properly), and a customer who will not ask the company to do anymore of that type of project for him.

Lackadaisical work, or as the writer of these proverbs suggests a sluggard, does not lead to nice promotions.  It might lead to the unemployment line.

But I have known people who just could not manage their time.  They would get 10% of the project completed and it was award-winning quality.  But the project was due to the customer in a week, and the 10% is all they had done.  With one particular project engineer, a friend and I had to drop our projects and pull off another “miracle.”

So, what Rev. Swindoll is saying is that we should strive for completion, but completion that we can be proud of, not something thrown together, hoping that the customer doesn’t notice, even if that customer is our spouse.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.