Better Together
Recently I have been able to spend time with my brother and sister in a different way than I have previously. I have shared bedrooms, meals, and more of my CDs than I ever wished to with my siblings. Now I’m sharing a new responsibility of service planning for Severn River Church. We meet weekly for a serious and productive discussion of the previous week’s worship service, before turning our attention to the upcoming services and events. The meeting works well, because obviously, we know each other extremely well. There is no subtext to our discussions, no personal agendas.
The best part for me is that this meeting allows each of us to focus on what our individual gifts are; for three people raised in the same home by the same parents, we each have unique personalities, and Severn River Church gets the benefit. My sister is very relational. She loves to greet and serve people. She has a natural gift of making strangers feel like instant friends. She also loves children, decorating, and humor--she is one of the funniest people I know! My brother is the classic peacemaker, a person able to see value in everyone’s ideas and make people feel like they are connected to a group. He is a leader and a big-picture thinker. When I sit next to them in our meeting, I realize that I am not very funny, like my sister. I am not a peacemaker like my brother. My contribution is creative ideas and organization of details. My sister likes to joke that if we forged our three personalities, we would make the perfect person. I doubt that’s true, but I’m glad that we can bring three different perspectives to the table in our meetings.
I have another weekly meeting with a friend named Sue. Sue has a personality almost exactly like mine. In fact, we have scored within a few points of each other on different personality tests. When I meet with Sue, our similar personalities are so complimentary that one might think we can’t really sharpen each other, but that meeting is just as valuable as the service planning meeting. We push each other, question each other, coach one another, and commiserate together about how annoying everyone else is!
As we left our meeting today, Sue said, “We are better together,” citing the Biblical explanation of the Body of Christ in I Corinthians 12:12-27. I thought it applied to my meeting with Sue, my almost-mirror in personality, but it was also appropriate for my meeting with Ben and Sarah, who are in many ways my opposites. We are better together.