On Your Team

This week in February brings both Super Bowl Sunday and Valentine's Day!  So I thought I'd write about something that brings them both together:  loving someone well means to be on their team.  (This post will go towards a faith conclusion.)

Who does this apply to?

It's for all the kinds of love!  Romantic love, familial love, friendship, church body - anybody you're in committed, loving relationship with.

What does it mean to be on someone's team?

It means you're moving towards the same end goal together, and that their good and your good is bound up together.  It means you're cheering for them in strength and helping them up  in weakness.  It means you have their back.  It means you celebrate together and suffer together.  It means when you make a play, you're thinking about how that's going to work for the greater good of the whole team and not just how it's going to make you look awesome.  It means you as an individual are working hard at whatever your role is so that the team can thrive.  And hopefully, it means you will have lots of fun times and friendship built along the way.  These principles make for a strong team, and they also make for a strong and lasting relationship.

(I did a whole blog post on team sports awhile ago because they are my favorite.)

That's pretty straightforward?  

It makes sense intellectually, and it's the ideal to strive towards, but it's so hard to put into practice.  I'm not especially good at any of this, and I'm writing this post to preach it to myself as much as anyone.  It's hard to be selfless and put others first, especially those I'm around the most (and those are the ones I love the very most). 

And then add to this, the inevitable bumps of life, like:  the adolescent who doesn't want to be on your team.  The relative who feels different about politics and this drives a wedge in your relationship.  The friend who is going through a season where they're always too busy.  When you and your partner disagree on something important.  (These examples were easy to think of because these have all been me.)

So we have the goal of being a good teammate, and then we have the challenges internally and externally to making this goal a reality.

So how do we overcome these challenges?

1. We can ask God to help us.  This is always a good first step when we face a task that's too big for us.

2. We can remember the incredible grace and forgiveness and unconditional love we've been shown, and be humbled at the much smaller ask that's being made of us towards the relationships in our life.   

3.  We can look to a future when relationships will be perfected.  It won't always be a struggle to put others first, and we won't always be dealing with brokenness in ourselves, our loved ones, and the world.  Someday this will all be easier, and we can be encouraged looking to that future.

Happy Valentines Day to all, and sending love to those of you reading this who are my real life loved ones!  Thanks for being on my team!  

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Caveat:  I've said this before and I'll surely say it again - one of the hard things about writing a blog is that you never know exactly who will end up reading it.  So I want to be sure to say that I'm not writing this to condone situations of abuse, and I'm not writing this to condemn situations where relationships have already broken.  Sending nothing but love, not advice, in those cases.