Then, punctuality is always an important issue with me. It is not just a matter of respecting the other person's time, although this is certainly a part of it, but when you tell a person that you are going to meet him at a certain time, you are giving him your word.⁷ And if your word is no good, then you are no good. If you say that you are going to do something, then make it happen.

With this person, it used to be that he would agree to meet me at a certain time, and then when he arrived late, he would give all sorts of excuses. But all the problems he mentioned could have been avoided if he had planned to arrive early, as I always do with any appointment, instead of just planning to arrive on time, if even that. As I recall, after some admonition, he corrected this, and that was commendable.

Moving on to even smaller details, I noted the manner in which he placed the stamps on the envelops that he would send me. They were crooked and all over the place. The envelops would usually be somewhat wrinkled, and sometimes I would find coffee stains on them. Now, unless he respected other people much more than he did me, I could only imagine how he would treat those who would correspond with this ministry.

I told him not to use all small letters when he sent me emails – he did not listen. I told him to neatly divide his messages to me into sensible paragraphs – he jammed everything together into one huge block of text. I told him that I disliked abbreviations – he used them freely.

I told him to speak clearly, conveying complete thoughts with complete sentences: "State the subject and the object, and relate the two properly, so that I will know who is doing what to whom!" It is amazing that even many college graduates cannot do this. But with their mumbling lips and shifting eyes, they will test your patience to its limit. To get a coherent message out of them, you have to be a modern-day Socrates, asking probing questions to guide their answers and to extract the needed information out of them.

Details like these piled up so that I wondered, "Does he really care about the work? Is he nearly competent enough to perform even the simplest tasks? Is this how he will represent this ministry if I allow him to work with me?" Needless to say, I did not accept him as a volunteer. And if I must be this strict with a volunteer (although I think my demands were reasonable), I would certainly never pay someone like this to work with me in the ministry. Still less should a person like this, who lacked a most basic level of competence and discipline, be allowed to teach spiritual things.

Notes

⁷ The very fact that some people do not think of punctuality this way is telling enough. They consider only formal promises as binding, and not their ordinary speech. Their words are cheap. See Vincent Cheung, The Sermon on the Mount.

(to be continued)

 

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