Embracing Newness

New people stir things up. They drive us out of ruts. They make us question how we have been doing things and they provide opportunities and catalysts of change.

New flowers bloomed

This week we’ve had a visitor. He only has one week in Africa under his belt.  Our newer teammates look like seasoned veterans in comparison. His questions and confusions help to highlight all the ways that they have grown and learned. As he goes around with our teammate of 5 years, his simple questions have opened up several new opportunities for her to share again or for the first time with people she has known for a long time.

As a team, we were learning about and discussing the cycles of teams. There was a graph with ups and downs, highlighting areas like ‘honeymoon stage’ and ‘conflict’. It struck me that it was very much the same terminology and graphics that we’ve seen when learning about culture shock or marriage. When big changes happen, there are common cycles of emotional and developmental ups and downs.

Our role as team leaders changes depending on where everyone is in the process. This gets complicated because we have a mixed team. Some teammates have been here months, another a year, another two years, another multiple years. As leaders, we hope to interact with teammates differently depending on where they are in the journey of personal adjustment to life and work on the islands. On top of that our teammates interact together differently depending on where we are as a group on the journey of adjustment to team life. But any time we accept a new team member that team journey partially or completely restarts. It makes things complicated!

New experience for our visitor

We’ve seen other teams decide that the rollercoaster is too much. They decide to not accept new people for a few years (or indefinitely), thus getting rid of one complicating dynamic of team life. We see the attraction. As soon as all your teammates are veterans, then the individual ups and downs are less and the team knows each other better and can thrive in ways that they couldn’t before.

But even if leaders want to take a break from accepting new people, all too soon the veterans start getting called away to different things, the team shrinks and they realize that they have to ‘restart’ with a new batch of new people if they want the work to continue.

The cycles of change and transition, of welcoming newness, come upon us even if we successfully resist them in the short-term. So we try to embrace the newness, we remember the blessings that new relationships and new perspectives bring. Seeing people beginning their journeys of adjustment reminds us of the blessings we have experienced and gives us new insights into our own journey.

Trying a new painting technique

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Our visitor has been part of lots of cool opportunities to share truth with islanders and lots of chances for him to get glimpses into work and life on the islands. Tom was able to finish studying some a series of story books with a longtime island friend and they are moving on to studying stories from the main book. He is learning and absorbing a lot and sharing with his family. Our son got his results back and learned he passed his local school exams. Our daughter had her end of year concert at school in mainland Africa. There are plans in the works for a gathering to distribute the first copies of the newly translated books and introduce players with audio versions. Our teammate joined a gathering of islanders this weekend and was encouraged by the things she saw. 


PRAYERS REQUESTED
One of our teammates is traveling to South America for 3 weeks. Pray for smooth travels and a restful time for her as she interacts with workers in a very different context. Two of our teammates have been plagued by bad water issues at their house, pray for good solutions as they look into cistern options. We hope to finish the homeschool this week so that we don’t have to be doing it while our daughter is home. Pray that we could get it all done without it being stressful. Megan has seen some improvement in her pain, but it is still well above her normal levels. Continue to pray for healing. The wedding season is beginning on the islands. Pray that our team attending weddings would lead to deeper relationships and opportunities to have good conversations.