I’m going to let you in on a little piece of World Race culture that freaked me out a little at first.
Five times a week, in the evenings after ministry, we have designated ‘team time’ to spend together reflecting on the day and processing through anything that we are struggling with. This could take a variety of forms, depending on the day. We have one evening dedicated to worship, one to our Bible study through Romans, one to storytelling and blogging, one to highlighting the spiritual gifts we have seen in each other during the week, and one to just relax, play games and have fun. No matter what the evening looks like, though, we always finish with feedback. This is, essentially, a time to call out what we have seen in each other throughout the day, both positive and ‘constructive’ (never bad).
When this process was first explained to us at training camp, I thought it sounded like a horribly awkward way of forcing compliments out of each other, and an even more awkward way of forcing us to tell each other when someone else on the team pissed us off, in front of the whole group. To be honest, it kind of started out that way. During team times last month, no one had much to say, and when we did it was all positive. We would point out ways we had seen each other grow through ministry, acts of kindness or service we had seen each other perform, or conversations that had brought encouragement.
To get passed the awkwardness of it all, we are continually reminded that this is how we should be living, anyway. Eventually, the goal of all of this is to cultivate a lifestyle of encouragement and calling each other higher, to counteract the negativity and insults that permeate through the culture we live in. I was skeptical at first, but the more we practice it, the more I realize how effective it actually is. It started with pretty much nothing but positive feedback last month, but whether as a result of knowing each other better or from being separated from the full squad of forty people this month and living in closer community, we’ve become more willing to call each other out on things when we feel it is needed.
I am not perfect (shocking, I know) so I have been called out a fair number of times on behaviors that I really need to work on. The common theme in a majority of these, though, is thinking before anything comes out of my mouth. I joke with people that sarcasm is my love language, tell people not to take ninety percent of the things I say seriously (probably because I don’t take myself seriously most of the time), and had one of my teammates tell me last month, *almost* completely as a joke, that everything I said was a step too close to sacrilegious. It’s one of those things that I’ve been aware of, but have never really done anything about because it didn’t feel important. I regularly used the same logic with my car’s check engine light back home, and it usually resulted in me spending a lot more money than I would have had to, had I taken it in right away.
At home with my car, I’d wait until the horrible noises coming out of the engine or the breaks finally annoyed me enough to deal with them. Here, the wake-up call came after being informed, during a few different feedback sessions, that I had unintentionally offended or insulted someone with some nonsense I had said without giving it a second thought. The first time, in all honesty, I blew it off. I used the excuse that these people didn’t really know me that well yet, and that they would get used to my sense of humor eventually, just as my friends back home had. I figured living in this tight of quarters would help to expedite that process, but it has actually had the opposite effect. After a couple more examples came up in the following days, I came to the conclusion that I should probably take it seriously.
One of my teammates suggested that I start tithing my sarcasm – ten percent a month – so that by month eleven I’d be fully rid of it. While I don’t think I’ll be going quite to that extreme, I have been learning this month to think more about how I communicate. The more I think about it, the more I realize that there are two big reasons that I am the way that I am in this area.
First of all, I really don’t like letting people in passed the surface level, and I have very few people who I feel like I can have deep conversations with about whatever is going on in my life. Even before the Race, I had some realizations that the way I communicate tends to keep people at an arm’s distance, and as a result, when anything serious would come up, the conversations felt awkward and uncomfortable because of how out of the ordinary they were. I spend so much of my time not being serious that when I try to be, I feel the need to convince people beforehand that that side of me actually exists.
In the last two months, I feel like the balance between the two has been strained. Obviously, we are encouraged to have deep, spiritual conversations with all our teammates about God, our faith, and the why we believe what we do. We are encouraged to let people in, and to go far beyond surface level relationships. I am not good at that. (I wrote a whole post about it a few weeks ago if you want to check it out.) In that strain, I feel like my sense of humor has gotten more aggressive at times, which is where I’ve gotten into trouble. It’s almost like a defense mechanism as I try to retain that part of my identity in an environment where it really needs to be toned down.
This second one had to be pointed out to me before I realized it, but the other piece of this is that I don’t take myself seriously most of the time. I was told by one of my squadmates directly the other day that I don’t give myself enough credit for the things I’m good at, and I don’t recognize the gifts that God has given me as something useful I have to contribute to this team. I think, subconsciously, my reasoning was that if I didn’t take anything I said or did seriously most of the time, that no one else would. But that has clearly not been the case. People have taken some things I’ve said far more seriously than I intended, and that is where my self-reflection started.
During team time last week, we had the chance to spend two hours pouring into each other and highlighting the spiritual gifts we had seen in each of our teammates the week prior. With everything that was pointed out for me, my initial reaction was to tell them that I certainly did not have any of that. But I wasn’t allowed to respond – I could just sit, listen, and reflect. And in that process, and a conversation I had later that day, I began to realize that this was another root of the struggles I had been having. There’s a whole part of my identity that gets wrapped up trying to make everything funny and lighthearted that I forget that there is another part of me that actually has something useful to offer – a side of me that I don’t often recognize. My gut reaction to compliments is to blow them off, just as my gut reaction to being told I had any spiritual gifts at all was to, for some reason, doubt that God had given them to me.
Words carry a lot of power, both good and bad. Some of the things I’ve said without thinking in the last few weeks have been hurtful, and some of the things that I’ve spoken over myself for years have been lies and roadblocks that have significantly limited my spiritual growth. On the other hand, the things that my teammates have spoken over me since I left last month have been exactly what I’ve needed to hear. They have pushed me in areas they saw I needed to grow, and encouraged me in places that they saw unutilized potential. All of this combined has brought so much life and healing in not only my relationships with them, but also in my relationship with God.
This is just one of many ways I’m growing this year. I wrote about another one last week, and I’m sure there will be more in the coming days. I don’t want these posts to just be me recounting stories from our ministry. Some of them will be. But I also want to let you all in and show you what God is teaching me every day I am on the field.
Thank you, as always, for following along with my journey.
