Following the Leader

1 Thessalonians 5:12-13 Dear brothers and sisters, honor those who are your leaders in the
Lord’s work. They work hard among you
and give you spiritual guidance. Show
them great respect and wholehearted love because of their work. And live peacefully with each other.

 

All of my life I’ve
been a leader and I never knew until coming on this trip how hard it is for me
to follow, I find it a lot easier to lead than to follow, but God has been
teaching me that if I want to be a good leader I
have to follow. The first several
months as Mosaic struggled I got really frustrated a lot about leadership styles, and often found myself comparing
the way I lead to the way I was being lead. I also realized that I had put limits
on God, and as we all know God doesn’t allow that. 

 

At training camp I
took the back seat because I didn’t want to lead a team, and I’m very thankful
that he didn’t feel I needed to lead, but I also told Him that I had to have a
team leader older than me. Well God granted
that as well but in December God took that away from me, and for that I’m
extremely grateful! God has taken that
pride of thinking that people younger than me can’t
lead well and made me rely on his will. I’m very thankful that Bethany is our leader and I’m learning so much
about what it is to be a good leader by taking a back seat and following. By placing Bethany as a leader it’s made me
realize that God’s will is better than my will. The first several months were pretty awful for our team and we were all
extremely excited about a change when we were in Bulgaria, but as we all know
we had no change and that left our team in complete turmoil. We changed our name in hopes that we would
begin new, but I don’t think the process of redeeming our team started until
the end of Israel when Bethany was placed as leader.