The Blessing of Grace // Are You a Blessing or a Burden, Part 4

<p>God wants us to be a blessing, not a burden mind you, a blessing to the people around us. And there are some amazing ways to be that blessing – none more amazing, than the blessing of grace.</p> <p> </p> <h4><span style="color: #ff9900;"><strong>Being a Team-Player</strong></span></h4> <p>Now you don’t have to be an accomplished coach or player or tactician to figure out the team that’s in conflict is most unlikely to win the game. And while you may not be a member of a sporting team, there are plenty of other teams that we’re all members of. Our family; our workplace; our church; our social group; because as social beings, as social creatures we organise ourselves to work together to achieve some common goals (or outcomes) as a team, and that’s how it should be.</p> <p>But sometimes, boys and girls, we don’t play that nicely together, do we? We behave a little like two-year-olds, fighting over a toy or competing for our mother’s attention, or arguing over who got more ice cream in their bowl than the next one. It’s true isn’t it? It’s amazing – the capacity that we supposedly mature adults have, when we get together, to behave like children; arguing, squabbling, comparing, competing … “He got more than me! That’s not fair! She didn’t play fair!” and on it goes.</p> <p>Why does that happen? Well the more we have, the more we want to have, and the more individualistic (rather than collective or team-based) our perspective becomes. It’s quite a global trend, so now everybody’s clamouring for recognition; for reward; for attention; for position; for all those things that an individual want, over and above what the team needs. Politics can be a tough game, but when we take it into the workplace for instance, it gets very grubby very quickly.</p> <p>I was talking to a young woman working for a large corporation the other day. She has a boss who isn’t really that much across the detail of the job, so every time there’s some problem, he calls her and asks her to fix it, even when she’s overseas on a holiday. But then