The Value of And
Philippians 1:1
Paul and Timothy...
I've been thinking about the word collaborate. As a kid, I would be paired with my sister to clean our room and because she's four years younger, she would be playing my little pony under the bed while I was doing a majority of the work. Naturally I ratted her out to mom in the process. In school, I hated collaborating. I was always paired with students who were slackers so I had to do a lot of the work and they just piggy backed on my grade. When I first started working, I hated collaborating because I always got put on teams of coworkers who wanted to do the minimum necessary to get a paycheck.
For years, I found collaborating to be more frustrating than fruitful so I would opt for the "do it yourself" route. But as I get older, I realize this is selfish and stupid. God has wired us to need an "and."
I love how the book of Philippians starts out Paul and Timothy. This letter is going to be a collaborative process. We don't know how much Timothy actually contributed. Maybe this was like a "marital we" like when my wife says "we need to mow the lawn." Now she's not actually going to help me push the mower she just wants me to know I have her moral support and astute observation that the lawn looks like a scene from Jurassic Park. Maybe Timothy didn't contribute a lot, but whatever his part, the letter to the Philippians is more than Paul and more than Timothy. It's powered by and.
Now collaborating is not always easy. It does have the word labor in it. Any mom can tell you that labor is a painful process but the life it creates is worth it (although this is often debated when that life is crying in the middle of the night). But when a team of people come together they can create something that none of them could have done on their own.
This week the team at Moody and I finally worked out the title for my upcoming book. Drum roll please.
Losing the Cape
The Power of Ordinary in a World of Superheroes
By Dan Stanford
That could be a book on cooking cabbage and I'd buy it because the title is so good. Now if you saw some of the titles prequels, some of the back and forth you would be even more impressed. It was only as the Moody team and I labored together that we were able to birth what none of us could have done on our own. Once again, I learned that We is better than me.
Who are your ands?
Who is helping to bring the best out of you?
What ideas could you birth if you learned how to collaborate?
