Amysan

While sitting in church service today, the speaker mentioned something that reminded me of my team in Japan. The speaker mentioned that we each have our unique gifts and talents – things that we’re good at. But we also have areas in which we are lacking in gifts and talents – things we’re not so good at. The awesome thing about the body of Christ is that while one person may be gifted in one area, there is another person that is gifted in that area in which the other lacks. Together, when we form a body, we can work together to make big things happen.

This reminds me of my team in Japan because we worked so well together. Whenever there was a large task to be completed, we talked about needed to be done and then we all went out and got those things done. At the end of each VBS day, we had to clean the entire community center. It included mopping the common room and hallways, then vacuuming the common room and hallways, washing everything in the kitchen, putting everything we used back to where we originally found it, taking down our VBS banners and other apparatus, storing our things inside the hallway closet, sweeping out the dirt in the foyer, putting back all the slippers on the shelf, etc. Last year, they had gotten into some trouble with not doing a thorough job cleaning the center; so this year, we made an extra effort to clean the center so that it was cleaner than when we arrived. We were given 30 minutes to do this everyday after VBS was over and all the kids had left. The first day we just barely finished in time but on the second day, we cleaned that community center in 10 minutes flat! We all pulled together and got a seemingly large task done with so much time to spare.

This is just one example but it happened repeatedly throughout the entire trip. Our team was never late, we never missed our trains and it seemed that everything we set out to do, we completed. I feel the success of this is due mostly in our ability to work as a team and for each individual to rely on and trst in God to give us what we needed to accomplish our mission. It is also apparent that each person had their own role on our team – it was never assigned but it was something that each person naturally took upon themselves to fill.