SWOT

There's been a lot of celebrating going on in my Operation Christmas Child life since National Collection Week last November.  God's gifts in an increased harvest of shoeboxes were more than I imagined on every level.

But now the end zone celebration is over and it's time to get back into the game.  This is the time of evaluating last year's season and planning for the new year.  We're 'in the huddle', so to speak.

This week as part of that evaluation process I've been using what's called a SWOT analysis.  S=Strengths; W=Weaknesses; O=Opportunities; T=Threats

With one of those words in each quadrant of a sheet of paper, I've been trying to jot down assessments of each area of our team.  It's enlightening and humbling and exciting and scary all at once.

In many ways our team doesn't fit the typical Operation Christmas Child model.  We spend a lot of our energies planning a huge community-wide shoebox packing party that takes so much planning it actually requires a team all its own.  It's hard to know how to make that part of the team model.

Some of our strengths are also our weaknesses--strange, but true.  For example, our team is quite diverse, which gives us strength but is also a weakness because it makes unity somewhat harder to achieve.

In fact, as I look at these SWOT analysis sheets from both the 2010 and 2011 season I see that team unity is something I really need to work on.  This is difficult to achieve when only a portion of our diverse team attends each meeting.  This is difficult but not hopeless.

I keep reminding myself that despite my weaknesses as a leader and the weaknesses of our team God did bless us with 34,941 shoeboxes in our area.  This year we're praying for 40,000.

Time to huddle up and get in the game.