I’m in the Japan Alps, supervising CAJ 10th graders during leadership training. I’m sitting in a circle with my group of eleven 10th graders, talking about the experiences of the day:

• The 2-hour hike past a huge waterfall. (Standing in the spray, feeling the pounding up from the rocks beneath our feet, one Japanese girl hollered at me over the roar, “Someone just needs to bring busloads of people up here from Tokyo—if they could see this, they’d believe in God!”)
  
• The mountain biking. (Said a student, “That was so cool!”)
  
• Going up the climbing wall. (The climbing wall was one of the walls of the lobby, and I’d had to drag a few kids off it to come to the circle.)

“So, what did you learn?” I ask them. Here are a few of their answers:

• An important part of leading is listening to others.
  
• I need the courage to make myself heard when I have an idea.
  
• An important part of leading is knowing when you need help.
  
• I think that by all this leadership training CAJ wants us to learn that we can’t do life by ourselves—we need to collaborate.

Bingo.

Collaboration is how a body works. And as Christ’s body, we collaborate to glorify God, accomplish His work in the world, and cheer each other on to the prize for which God has called us heavenward in Christ Jesus.