"When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled!" - Having recently spent time in Africa, the title to my friend's most recent blog post jumped out at me.

I think he does a great job of highlighting the importance of staff and board unity. So this week, I want to share his post with you. With his permission, I have posted it below, but you can also read it on his webpage/blog at: http://leadingfromthesandbox.blogspot.com

Enter TJ Addington:

When Elephants Fight, The Grass Gets Trampled
It is a saying from Congo and it is about what happens when leaders get into disputes with one another. Who gets hurt when leaders fight? The people they are supposed to be leading and this is nowhere more evident than when there is conflict among leaders in the local church.

*Choice 7 of 10 in the Take Back Your Life blog series

In the last blog post, we learned that life is designed by God to be lived as a “team sport.” If it is a team sport, it only makes sense that you should focus the majority of your time doing what you do best. God wants you to maximize your personal gifts and abilities for the good of the team.

Every believer has special and unique gifts he or she can contribute in service of others. None of us is meant to be a “do it all” generalist. Rather, each one of us has special functions that are designed to complement one another. Great lives are not built by improving weaknesses, but by maximizing strengths.

You might be thinking, I’m not really sure what my gifts and passions are.

*Choice 6 of 10 in the Take Back Your Life blog series

Some time ago a man came to my office for counseling. He was frustrated because he did not feel God’s love or presence in his life. He had felt it in the past, as a young man in our high school and college ministries, but no longer. He had prayed for it, and as far as he was concerned, it hadn’t come. He was tempted to give up on God and walk away from the faith. He couldn’t understand why God, if He were alive and cared, wouldn’t reach out to him.

I just sat and listened. Then a thought came to me. I told him that the very fact that I was there listening to him, caring about him, was the love of God in action. If it weren’t for God’s love, I wouldn’t even care about his youthful doubts and questions. I would have been preoccupied with other “more important” things to do than to sit and listen to him. But Christ was alive, living in me, listening through me, and eager to answer his questions with love. I asked him if he sensed that I really cared. He did. I told him what he was feeling was not just the love of Dale, but also the love of God in me for him.