Every Place's Challenges

This week I (Tom) traveled to the island of Madagascar to help lead a training session about team-leading for men and women who live and work on that great and diverse island and have a similar vision and purpose as we do.

Learning together

Madagascar is huge.  226,000 square miles.  3,000 miles of coastline.  25 million people.  18 distinct people groups.  Their people and their struggles are different than on our islands.  As I listened to the stories of different attendees, I was struck by just how different each different location is and how different their challenges are.  For some of them, the biggest challenge is poverty and drought.  For others, it is dealing with violence and theft.  For others, there are evil spirits and worship of ancestors.  For others, there are troubles of deep jealousy and distrust.  For still others, there are problems of honor, shame, cover-ups, lying and corruption.  Every place has its challenges.

Yet we were there to talk about teams. The challenges that teams face seem to all come down to the same things again and again.  The hardest part about being on a team is interpersonal conflict.  

Learning about team

How do you get people to work together, love each other, and achieve something of value?  More than that, how do you avoid spending all your strength and energy dealing with conflict and misunderstandings on your team?  

For example, it is hard to deal with poverty and drought.  It is going to take all your compassion, strength and resources to deal with it.  But if, as a team you don’t agree on how to deal with famine and drought, if you are unwilling to work with one another, unwilling to forgive when your teammates make mistakes, and unwilling to trust them, much of your strength will go to dealing with your team. So when the interpersonal conflict is combined with the poverty and drought, it will soon become overwhelming.  Burnout and/or the break-up of the team often follows.

As we talked about all sorts of things to help teams get along, grow, and resolve conflict,  the heart of it all it seemed to come back to the same things again and again and again.  What teams need most is humility, forgiveness, and trust.

These aren’t things that come from a book or a formula, they come from God working in our hearts. Every place has its challenges, but some challenges are the same across the board.  So though our island teams may face very different challenges from those of the teams in Madagascar, we all need to have our hearts worked on. We all need humility, forgiveness and trust if we are going to work with others. So we can all learn from each other’s stories. Stories of struggles and failure, of victories and redemption, as we look to thrive on teams by handing over our hearts to our humble, forgiving, trustworthy God.

New friend in Madagascar

PRAYERS ANSWERED
We are thankful for our daughter’s 15 years and for the community, friends and dorm parents that were able to appreciate and celebrate her on her birthday at boarding school. We’ve celebrated birthdays of two of our other teammates as well! We are thankful for all of them.  The conference that Tom was helping lead went really well. It ended today and he begins his (long) travels back to the island tomorrow. Pray for a smooth trip back. We heard that Bako made it home to Clove Island from his trip (that we wrote about a couple weeks ago), we look forward to hearing from him how it went. Another Clove island sister helped lead her friend to accept the good news this week! There has also been encouraging stories of changed lives and new commitment on the big island as well. We rejoice and continue to pray for growth and more changed lives!


PRAYERS REQUESTED
Two of our teammates had a break-in during the early hours of Friday morning that woke them from their sleep. Thankfully the thief left quickly once they woke up, but it was a scary experience and the thief had taken pains to force his way in. Pray for peace of mind for our teammates, especially that they would be able to sleep well at night. Pray for this rising trend of forced break-ins on the island. Boats have still not resumed between the French Island and Clove Island, and things there continue to be tense and volatile. Continue to pray for the light to shine in this complicated and messy situation. This is our one teammate’s last week living on Clove Island before leaving to get married and then live on the big island. Pray for her as she finishes things, packs up her stuff, and says goodbyes. Pray for this new chapter that she is beginning. She has been with us for a long time, so pray for us and our team too in this time of transition. We have heard that there might be a meeting soon between two island brothers that have been estranged for years— pray that the meeting actually happens and that repentance, forgiveness, humility and trust would grow.