It wasn’t a happy moment. Standing by the elevator in a Middle Eastern hotel, I watched an older team member exit the door and promptly miss a step. Her body crumpled on the floor and an agonized moan followed.

This is not the place for a broken body, I thought, as I knelt beside her. “She needs to be still for a moment,” I said. Thankfully she was the only team member who didn’t move.

One person placed a call to our local worker who’d grown up in the area. Another texted our home office asking for prayer. Yet another called our team leader who was still in route. The rest of us gathered around our teammate and spoke to God: we needed Him to enter into this situation. No person directed individual actions, but each member of that newly formed team saw what needed to be done and did it.

This “doing” continued throughout that three-week ministry. Before every meal and session, our two physically strong team members carried our broken friend in her wheelchair up and down marble steps. Throughout each day, one of us was her runner, and all of us continued to pray. This diverse team, strangers to each other before arrival in that country, had bonded quickly and deeply – exactly what we had all requested in preparation for this work.

Nope, I still wouldn’t ask for a broken body to be the catalyst to build team unity, but I’m so glad I didn’t miss the way God brought our team a single heart and mind through it.