Created For Relationship

The focus at our recent S.T.A.R.T. (Student Teamwork and Readiness Training) event for incoming 7th grade students was TEAMWORK.  We spent a great deal of that time talking about the foundation of teamwork, relationships.  Early in Genesis we find God saying "It is not good for man to be alone"; although the immediate context is Adam's need of a helpmate, the larger application is that man is created for relationship.  This is confirm by the nearly sixty references to "one another" in the New Testament.  John Donne repeats this them in classic literature, observing that "no man is an island, entire of itself..." And popular culture recognizes this truth, poignantly illustrated by the movie Castaway where the Tom Hanks character, in the absence of human interaction, famously established a "relationship" with a volleyball he names Wilson.

In many ways, a Christian school is an ideal place to develop the "one anothers" of the Christian faith in the student's formative years.  Just like the "real world", a Christian school is filled with imperfect people living out their faith in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Encourage one another, bear with one another, forgive one another, love one another, serve another, spur one another on to love and good works, clothe yourself in humility toward one another .... what better place to practice the exercise of these traits than in a Christian school.  There, under the care of godly teachers, students are able to be "iron sharpening iron" as they learn how to be cooperative members of the Body of Christ as described by the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 12, the team to which God has called all believers.

At the end of the S.T.A.R.T. program, we gave the student teams thirty minutes to create a video illustrated some of the teamwork ideas we talked about.  I thought you might enjoy a couple of those videos.