So the last couple weeks our leadership team has faced this issue of what to do with a team of 15 who has made their team house a place to just live, a house where love is scarce, and encouraging words are no longer dripping off their tongues. We look at the potential of this team and our hearts break for the lack of true community. Because we know what true community fosters; it fosters love, it builds people up, it speaks truth into hearts and it allows people to just be themselves. So instead of sitting back and allowing the enemy to steal anymore life from our team, we came up with a couple ideas or games that are attempting to create healthy team interaction and true community once again.

Last week we played a game called Secret Servant, a Christian version of Secret Santa if you will. I assigned each student to another and they had to serve that person in secret all week. We asked them to be creative in ways that they could serve in secret, as sometimes our service is unknown to man and does not need recognition in its truest form. There were many creative ideas, people were doing other's chores, they were making each other's beds, they took their person on scavenger hunts for goodies, there were encouraging notes floating around, for example one said this team would suck with you here and attached was a sucker. By the end of the week everyone knew who their secret servant was, but it was nice to see our team serving and loving each other once again.

This week we decided to continue trying to help build our team morale. Today we gave each student a disability. Some have no voice, others cannot use their hands, some have one hand, some can only use their voice, some have one leg, some are blind and one girl has to pray for any person that initiates conversation with her (I know not a disability, but has a true purpose). Any time that the students are home or on our property they have to enact their disability and if at anytime we catch them not, they will do 25 pushups each. We hope to show those who are blind or without hands that there are other ways to serve their teammates. We hope to show those without a voice the weight that our words carry. We hope to show those who are normally functioning how hard it is to carry the full load of a team by themselves. We hope to show our team that they need each other, that this body of Christ is missing parts when it's not functioning normally and interdependently. We played this for the last day and a half and it proved to be effective in teaching them the things we hoped for. I don't think it's a game that our team would want to play again, but it sure did give them a different perspective on their team and that's all we hoped for.

And we ended a great week of team builders with a great family night of House Olympics. For those of you who are frequent watchers of The Office, maybe you recall the episode of Office Olympics, which is what we tried to replicate. It was a great night, filled with laughter and fun. We lit the torch, we played the theme song of the Olympics, we sang the national anthem and we played games with each team member winning a medal throughout the night. And then we ended a fun filled night watching the inspiration of it all, The Office.

Cheering the Torch in.

Medalists.

Sword Drill.

Thank you for your prayers for our team this week. It was truly a blessed week with them and I am so thankful for the restoration that God is doing in each of their lives.

On another note, Holly and I taught this week on prayer. The books that we used to help guide our teaching sessions were The Art of Listening Prayer, by Seth Barnes and The Practice of the Presence of God, by Brother Lawrence. God definitely has blessed Holly and I, as we both were nervous about teaching. Our conversations have been excellent and I feel that we are leaving the students challenged, which was our intent. Praise God for using us outside of our comfort levels!

Blessings, Heather