Many of the women on my squad echoed the statement “I don’t want to be on an all woman’s team. There’s so much drama with women.” And here in Guija, Mozambique, where there’s no wifi and no city, there are twelve women who have agreed to do life together for a month.
And it is beautiful.
Watching the women spend hours together brings about two thoughts: quality time is important to a thriving community and group think will happen if people aren’t valued.
Quality Time is Important
There is a concept called Love Languages. It’s five main ways that people receive and give love. At least for these two all-women teams, a majority of our top love language is quality time. We feel loved by others when they spend time with us and have good conversations and make memories together.
When we don’t have much to do here, I watch us sit and talk and laugh. True bonds are forming. Joy and laughter are bringing us together when we may have never been friends before. This is so important to building a community that looks like the original church.
Everyone around was in awe- all those wonders and signs done through the apostles! And all the believers lived in a wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person’s need was met. – Acts 2: 43-45
We weren’t meant to live in isolation. A hard concept for people who grew up in the states is that you cannot succeed on your own. God didn’t make us like that. We were intricately woven together. Our stories and journeys depend on the people we meet and do life with. But to live life how God intended us to is work. It’s messy. People aren’t perfect so relationships won’t be perfect.
Choose to live life together with people who build you up. Spend quality time with them, learning about their past, present, and future. Love on them. Share your heart with them. Open up and build those bonds because if you want to live like Jesus did (which is what it means to be a Christian) then you must do life in a community.
Group Think Will Happen
Group think is that crowd mentality, where people tend to lose their personal convictions in order to fit in to the community around them. Generally it stems from a loud voice that drowns out everyone else’s. If people aren’t intentional about putting others before themselves, this will happen, and it will kill a healthy community so quickly.
The devil knows that if he can get us to not respect on another, then we won’t be united, and if we aren’t united then ministry and sharing God’s love suffers. We are in an area where witchcraft is real. At 3am, we can here the drums. And the number one way our host says they attack is through division.
So daily I fight to stay true to the life God and I have created, and I actively love each of these women that I am doing life with. I see these women the way God sees them, and we are all in different places in our life. I can only pray that everyone is fighting for the same thing.
As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. – Ephesians 4:1-3
Living with women is hard, and it isn’t because of drama. It’s because we feel deeply and don’t want to be hurt. But as I watch our relationships develop and people letting their walls down and asking God to show up, everything is worth it. Hearts are changing and God is showing up in our lives, and I can only hope that we continually fight for unity and friendship.
