same note or using identical instruments. They are all, however, playing the same song. The same could be said of a choir performing a piece of music. The song sounds richer because of the harmony, but an alto and a tenor don’t sing the identical notes, just the same song.

             Jesus called us to be the church, His body. We may do some tasks on our own. As Christians, though, we are all integral parts of the body of Christ. Body parts function together, as a team. A nose off by itself has a great deal of difficulty breathing, much less thumbing itself.

Individual Christians working together can be a challenge. Unlike a human body that comes already synchronized through DNA, a church body has to learn how to work in harmony. In his book, Doing Church as a Team, Wayne Cordeiro relates an entertaining story about how he learned to row as a member of a six paddle canoe team in Hawaii. He relates this story to how we learn to use our spiritual gifts to row the little ship of the church, everyone pulling together in the same direction, even if we don’t all sit in the same place and have the same paddle.

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Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Well, maybe! But not if you are T.O.S.S.E.D. Teams of Servants Sent Everywhere Delivering need to learn how to row together as a team. They also need to learn how to keep the boat afloat in storms and high winds. This takes both practice working together as a team and commitment to the Eleventh Step in a Twelve Step Program: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

             What if we took this step seriously in our daily lives? What if we prayed daily for knowledge of God’s will for us, just for that day, and for the power to do what God wants, just for that day? This is what one day at a time is about. It’s not as easy as it sounds, but with practice it gets easier. This is what Jesus did. He prayed all the time. He reminded us to pray daily not “my will be done” but “thy will be done.”

             Just for a moment, imagine we have prayed daily and God has given us a goal and a mission. How do we accomplish it? Everybody needs to pull in the same direction even if everyone isn’t doing exactly the same thing. An orchestra or a band can make beautiful music precisely because everyone isn’t playing the