Strength in Togetherness

Teamwork: Simply stated, it is less me and more we.

(Sigh) this past weekend, winter returned with a vengeance.  It rained, the wind blew, the hail fell, and finally, the snow covered my mountain home.  Somehow, in the middle of all this white loveliness, I noticed some big, huge, perfect snow flakes.  They were simple and crisp.  They were six sided and totally fragile.  When the girls caught them in their hair, or on their hands, the snow would melt away to nothing.  By itself, the flake was almost nothing.  But when it became part of many falling crystals, it had the power to stop the traffic.  It could trap us in our own driveway, it could keep us from our journey.
Tonight, the girls and I were watching an episode of Mythbusters from Netflix.  It was the show about the myth of the phone books.  For this one, the myth is that you can't rip a phone book if the pages are married together (or interlocked) with another one.
They first tried using human power to pull the phone books apart.  It did not work.  Than they tried to pull them apart using two cars.  Those were also unable to pull the books apart.  Finally, they had to use an armored tank and a personnel carrier from the military.  Those were finally able to pull the phone books apart.    The interesting part is that it took more than 8000 lbs of pressure to pull those books apart.  It is not something that was easy to do.
Think about this for a minute.  How easy are phone book pages to rip?  (Just ask any one year old that has discovered the joy of ripping them!)  I would never have imagined that the phone books had the potential to be that strong.
Any one of us, is probably not as strong as we think we ought to be.  We can be blown and tossed in the wind.  Ripped and torn apart in the trials of everyday living.  But together, we can accomplish those things that need to be done.  We can combine our time, our talents, and our work to accomplish so much more than any of us ever imagined.  Like the soft, white snow, individually, we are not as strong as we would like to be, but collectively, we can be all that is needed.  We can stop the traffic if we need to.  We can change the world.  We can change what people see and what they do simply by making a stand and then standing together.
With all the problems going on around us today, I think we need to remember how much we can change our tomorrows by working together today.  

Vince Lombardi (1913-1970), football coach for the NFL once said:

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society."