Team Camp Devotional - Encourage - 2021

What were your highs and lows of yesterday?

What made the good moments "good?"

What specifically happened that made you feel good about your tennis, the team, or this experience? 

Who was involved in that experience?

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My kids are builders. They are always building or constructing something. Forts in our living room, suits of armor made out of cardboard, Lego cities on the ping pong table, or sculptures out of their pasta noodles at dinner. Even as a couple of them are getting into middle school, their favorite games are games of gaining and building - Minecraft or games where you upgrade the powers of your characters.

I love this. It's fun to see their creations. If you scroll through my YouTube channel of family memories, more than once you'll see me feature the things they've built. A couple of years ago, Judah even built a tennis stadium, which was super cool!

Sometimes they build alone, but most of the time they want others to come and build with them. Pretty much every day, Abel asks me to come build something with me. Often times it's some type of fort, like yesterday he wanted me to come play "Pirates of the Caribbean" with him and build a pirate ship. We take 7 kitchen chairs and arrange them in the shape of a boat, then drape a blanket across the top of the back ones to make a cabin. I have to tie the corners of the blanket onto the spindles of the chairs, so that his rough play as he jumps around the ship in an eye patch doesn't knock the whole thing down. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with his imagination!

I like the process of building and creating too. Last summer, we had a new porch being built on the back of our house.  As workers threw away scraps of wood in the dumpster in the front yard, I would hoist Gideon up to the side and have him pull out the ones that I could use to make a tree house. I cobbled together bits and pieces of plywood for the floor and other pieces for supports. I took the nails and screws I found scattered in my garage and made a pretty strange looking treehouse. 

I really liked testing my building, making sure the supports were strong. I added way more nails and screws than necessary, because I wanted to make sure it would hold my kids up when they went tromping through it. Unfortunately, some of the screws stuck out at odd angles because I stripped them out and couldn't remove them. And some of the nails got bent. And some of the wood has kind of rotted. But now one summer later, the kids still use the tree house. 

It's fun to build something useful!

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When you were younger, what type of things did you like to create to build?

Do you still like to build things now? What type of things?

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In the story of creation as told in Genesis, we see that God is a creator too. A builder. One of the wonders of God is that God is able to build with words. God speaks and whatever is said is built. I think that one of the reasons we are builders and creators is because God is creative and a builder. We, as humans, have this piece of God's image in us.

Like God, our words build as well. When Jesus's followers were trying to form new communities committed to each other, they wrote to each other about the power of words and how to use them. They used two words to speak about this: oikodomeō and parakaleō.

Oikodomeō literally means to build. These followers of Jesus realized that whatever they said would begin to build a new reality. And so they wrote to one another things like this:

"Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing." - 1 Thessalonians 5:11

"'I have the right to do anything,' you say—but not everything is beneficial. 'I have the right to do anything'—but not everything builds up." - 1 Corinthians 10:23

Any words that we speak are like planks that we are adding to a tree house. Our hope is that the words we will speak build up the house rather than being pointless. Last summer, when I was trying to build a tree house, I could have just walked around the side lot and nailed random boards to random trees. I would have been building, I would have been creating, but I wouldn't have been building anything up. It wouldn't have had any intention, direction, or purpose - like we talked about yesterday. 

All of our words build something into our team. If our words are careless and critical, that causes distrust. In the end, that will make our team much weaker. If our words build each other up, we become strong.

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What words do you notice that are purposeless, that distract or even build unhelpful characteristics?

What words can you say to build each other up during practice, during downtime?

Offer some words to build up your other group members, right now.

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The second word about how to speak to each other is parakaleō. This word is usually translated to encourage, but it has an even cooler meaning. It literally means "call to be with." Yes, it's encouragement, but it is the encouragement of coming alongside someone to finish the task. It's "let's do this" instead of just "you can do this." It's coming and building a pirate ship blanket fort with someone instead of making them do it themselves while you sit back sipping your pour-over coffee and thinking about something else. 

This parakaleō is what we want to be as a team. We want to be there with each other. In a game of Five Errors like we played yesterday, we don't just want to tell Ethan "good job." We want to tell him he can get to his goal and then actively be engaged in helping him get there. We want our words and actions to be working together. 

So, think about your words today. Make sure that they are building up.

Then, think about your actions. Help them be building us up too.

If we can oikodomeō and parakaleō then we will have the strongest team :-)

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What strikes you in thinking about these two ideas of encouragement: building up and being with?

Which one of those ideas will challenge you the most?