“We want the Big Ten championship and we’re gonna win it as a Team. They can throw out all those great backs, and great quarterbacks, and great defensive players, throughout the country and in this conference, but there’s gonna be one Team that’s gonna play solely as a Team.
No man is more important than The Team. No coach is more important than The Team. The Team, The Team, The Team, and if we think that way, all of us, everything that you do, you take into consideration what effect does it have on my Team? Because you can go into professional football, you can go anywhere you want to play after you leave here.
You will never play for a Team again. You’ll play for a contract. You’ll play for this. You’ll play for that. You’ll play for everything except the team, and think what a great thing it is to be a part of something that is, The Team. We’re gonna win it. We’re gonna win the championship again because we’re gonna play as team, better than anybody else in this conference, we’re gonna play together as a team.
We’re gonna believe in each other, we’re not gonna criticize each other, we’re not gonna talk about each other, we’re gonna encourage each other. And when we play as a team, when the old season is over, you and I know, it’s gonna be Michigan again, Michigan.”
-Michigan Football Coach Bo Schembechler
This past week has been a challenging one. My team has continued our ministries, a lot of which are highly labor intensive, while being continually worn down by sickness (thanks for your prayers). Fortunately, this week I did not personally get sick, however many of the people on my team did and are continually fighting their ailments now. As a result of our trials, we have started to feel sorry for ourselves, myself included. Positive and negative attitudes are both habits formed over time and once formed they are both equally hard to break. Unfortunately, for our team last week, negativity seemed to be the norm.
On Saturday, our host family wanted to help us build team comradery by sending us to hike up a mountain. They gave each member of our team a letter for a step on the journey to the mountain. Once we completed the first task. We’d open up the second letter to find our next task. In the end the letters lead us up a mountain a few towns over. At the time, this seemed like a reasonable task even though we were on our own without a guide. Once we started up the mountain though, it was awful. I’m a twenty-one year old guy in decent shape, and I thought it was very difficult. The Sun was blaring down on us and we did not nearly have enough water because, going into the challenge, we had no clue what we were getting into. Oh, and on top of everything else, the letters leading us were in Spanish! Just a bunch more things to complain about.
And then something changed. No, we did not all magically get positive attitudes and start singing songs all the way up the rest of the mountain (actually, if anything, we complained more), but what did happen was health issues started. One girl had to go up the mountain quicker than everyone else because she wasn’t feeling well while moving. Another girl was starting to get sick which caused her to need to lag behind. These ailments separated our team into three groups. I cannot speak for the other groups but in my group something really cool happened. We were able to encourage and challenge each other up the mountain. I believe because of this back and forth, my team was able to make it farther up the mountain than we ever could have alone. Also, we got to see how much everyone else cared for us when they picked us up when we were down (sometimes quite literally). This teamwork is what I believe will be the linchpin to our success on The Race. At times we are going to need to challenge each other to give more while at other times we are going to have to encourage each other to keep going. Today, I am eager to continue this journey with my teammates. I now have confidence that they will be there when I stumble and let me help them when they stumble.
This week, please keep my teams health in your prayers especially as we leave Portoviejo on Sunday.
God Bless and Go Blue,
Chance
