The past week or so has been a great week for growth here at training camp. We have had disagreements within our squad and it has been very encouraging to me. Coming into this, I didn’t know what the repercussions of any sort of drama or disagreement with leadership might result in. And after this week, I have been extremely encouraged with how our squad has dealt with conflict. I believe this is going to be huge in the coming months to make sure that we are able to have unity within our squad and to serve God in the most effective ways possible. So many ministries have fallen because of conflict within, and it is just very encouraging to me to feel like we are going to be able to address every issue with love and a true desire to resolve the conflict and get back to serving the Lord and doing what we’re supposed to be doing.
These experiences have also showed me that conflict and disagreements can be a very valuable thing if handled correctly. The people within my squad come from all over the United States and we all have very different experiences and backgrounds, which will cause us to have different views and opinions on certain subjects. Going into this I was looking forward to growing because of our differences (not despite them), but I was still a little nervous to see how the people here would be able to handle disagreements and navigating through our differences. These worries have been calmed and my prayers answered. I am incredibly grateful for this. I have loved being able to navigate through our differences and being able to disagree and grow from it. In fact, we were setting up expectations and standards that we wanted to have within our team during this trip, and one of the things that we wrote down was not only being able to disagree, but being able to delight in our differences of opinion. I am a firm believer that we can grow so much by talking to people about differences. This doesn’t mean we have to change our opinions, but we can always learn from each other.
