Who Do You Play For?

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"Not a team player."

I've heard that phrase several times today as I watched the news swirling around the resignation of a Cabinet Minister of our present federal government here in Canada. It's a phrase I am personally familiar with.

Being part of a team is a good thing most of the time. It's efficient and makes the best use of the individual gifts of those who are its members. More gets done. But it can also be a curse when being part of a team means that individual members are not allowed opinions that differ from that of the team leader, when "the party line" must be towed even if it offends the personal values of an individual member.

I have no idea "who did what and to whom" in the present scandal coming out of Ottawa. Time will reveal the guilt or innocence of the parties involved—maybe.

But the situation stimulated the question: "Who do I play for?" I confess that I like to keep the people around me happy and will, most of the time, bend to accommodate them. But bending to, say, going to a certain restaurant when others prefer a different eatery, is not the same as bending a value that I hold dear to accommodate someone who holds different values. I say "value" not referring to personal preference, but to a Biblical value. Those don't fold, spindle, and should not get mutilated.

Twice in my career (to my knowledge at least), I have been accused of not being a team player because my opinions differed from those in authority over me. Both times the accusation was meant as a threat to keep me in line, to cause me to be afraid enough for my position to back down and to agree with what I didn't agree with. There were no reasoned arguments made to convince me that my position was wrong. I was ordered to comply—or else.

I did not comply and suffered the consequences.

But all that is, as they say, "water under the bridge." Would I change my actions? Some of them, yes.  I never do things perfectly and often handle things badly. But as I look back on some situations, I should have been even more forceful than I was, and more vocal. Sometimes we think that silence, that trying to keep the peace, that seeking to maintain unity, is the godly course of action. Sometimes that is true, and sometimes it is not.

When the upholding of Biblical values is at stake, there can be no silence, no acquiescence for the sake of unity.

The "team" we should be playing for has three members: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. To do less than to stand up for who they are and what they stand for is to deny them, to make others our "gods" and to worship at the wrong feet.

In the end, there is One and only One Who I need to please.