There is No 'I' in Team

Strong, independent, wild, free. Those are adjectives that resonate deep within my self. I will be the first to admit that I am more than a little in love with the gypsy lifestyle.

Travel, freedom, lack of commitment. Those are, unfortunately, my ideals, the ideas that I slide into by default. 

Most of the time I don't want to admit that there's anything wrong with the way that I live. I mean, who doesn't dream of taking off into the unknown, spontaneously, at least every once in awhile. I like to tell myself that I'm just a creative, free-thinking dreamer, living in my very own little reality.

Truth: I'm a runner. When times get hard physically, I disappear out the door, town, country. When an emotional crisis or awkward confrontation comes to a head, I leave-often physically, and if blockaded from physically disappearing, the emotional withdrawal is immediate. Sometimes I watch helplessly as I watch my little self running frantically over the hills in my mind, struggling to stay engaged with whatever is happening in the reality of the moment.

Why am I babbling on about my tendency to disappear? The word is team. Well for me, I would say, that much more accurately, the word is community.

I remember my first time attempting to help navigate a team through an airport, through a city, through 5 months of their life. I was horrible, not being a team player by nature, navigating a team for me felt more like locking myself in a closet and ripping every single hair out of my head. Working within a team leadership felt like death. The thought that other people might have different standards or ideas on how to disciple individuals was just absurd and I butted heads on a daily, if not hourly, basis. 

All those shameful glimpse to further prove how un-team I am.

I worked with good, godly people though. People who saw something more in me than my inability to trust or rely on anyone else for help. Through much coaching, patience, prayer and a few...arguments...ok, let's be truthful, all out fights, I slowly began to be more of a team player. 

I still hate travelling with other people. I would much rather breeze through customs and wander around airport terminals, people watching and shopping. I would rather tackle work projects all on my own, because my creative process and my final outcome are always exactly the way I want them. And I would rather live on my own because it means that the pot of coffee is always brewed to perfection and it is always all mine. But those are semantics and through the past years I have learned the value of team...the beauty of community.

It is refreshing to have others contribute their strengths to complement my weaknesses. It is rewarding to offer my strengths in order to serve others' needs. It is comforting, at the end of an unbearably hard day, to weep at the table of a friend and have them pray for you. It is welcome to walk into corporate worship and have souls bound together in sorrow and laughter, draw near to the heart of God. It is even good, to offer that pot of coffee, in exchange for deep (or undeep) conversation, souls walking together for this season of life. 

God created us for community. He created us for team. Nowhere in Scripture do we ever see someone walking completely alone. Only Adam, and God created a companion suitable to him, and then declared it very good. 

I will always be independent. My default will probably always be to do it on my own. But as I get older I see and value the wisdom of walking with others, whoever God has placed in my life for that season of the journey. People are a gift, a very rich blessing from God. There is no "I" in team. Just a Together Everyone Achieves More, as one of my fellow life-walkers aptly explained to me. 

I, of course, promptly rejected his advice and am still learning his wisdom the hard way. That was 4 years ago...maybe in the next 4 I'll have learned, but if not, you'll probably be able to track my boarding passes and find me still learning it the hard way...