team players

By God's grace I managed to evade ever having to participate in team-building exercises via a ropes course in the course of my working career or church camp days.  It's not that I'm not a team player.  It's just that I've been on enough "teams" where I was among those pulling more than our share of the weight so that now every time I hear phrases like "team-building" and "teamwork", it's all I can to suppress the darn near involuntary rolling of my eyeballs.

As overused as these closely-related terms are, they are very useful in family life.  After all, and as I often tell our bambini, God has built our family for a reason -- or several.  We probably won't fully understand those reasons this side of heaven.  Nonetheless, each of us has unique God-given abilities to help the others in the family become the people Christ calls them to be, and we are to use those gifts always with that service to others in mind. 

This focus on teamwork is a revelation to me of late as a means of counteracting selfish tendencies -- we all have them -- and a tool in both developing empathy and cultivating virtues like courtesy, respect, generosity, gentleness, and humility.  The virtues serve as the framework for my "phrasology" (to quote Mayor Shinn from The Music Man, which was our movie night feature last weekend) to expand upon the token "teamwork" buzzword I loathe but use anyway in certain circumstances.

So it is with reluctance that I continue to utter the "T" word, knowing that it's a good, quick reminder that each of us has an obligation to the others to help us all get to heaven.