“Two are better than one . . . If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!” – Ecclesiastes 4:9-10
My grandmother Wilson, or Munna as we grandkids lovingly called her, always had a shiny new Cadillac at her disposal sitting in the garage, courtesy of my grandfather, except she never drove it. I can count on one hand, with probably a couple of fingers to spare, the number of times I ever saw her behind the wheel. That changed, however, after my grandfather passed away who had always served as her chauffeur. After that she had to drive herself, which she did twice a week, on Wednesdays to the grocery store, and on Sundays to church. Except she didn’t exactly drive herself, she had a co-pilot.
After Munna was widowed her sister, my great Aunt Jenny, moved into her grand home so the two could look after each other and not be alone. It was a great arrangement that lasted many years. But if Munna seldom drove a car, Aunt Jenny never even learned how. To make matters worse, Munna suffered from failing eyesight caused by glaucoma, and Aunt Jenny was hard of hearing. What a pair, you might think. But we had a joke in our family that when they got in the car together Aunt Jenny was the eyes and Munna the ears, and between the two of them they made many a round trip together.
“Two are better than one,” the wise writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us, for “if one falls down, his friend can help him up.” Or in the case of my grandmother and great aunt, one’s weakness was compensated by the other’s strength, and vice versa, so that what neither could manage alone, together they did quite well. As the Apostle Paul points out, “Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function . . . [yet] each member belongs to all the others.”
Patrick Lencioni calls it teamwork. “It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare,” he points out in his highly acclaimed book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Notwithstanding that in today’s world turning two elderly women loose on the streets with such physical limitations as Munna and Aunt Jenny would be considered dangerous (but this was long ago and in a small town), what a team they were. And as far as I know that shiny Cadillac never suffered a scratch. To be pitied is the one “who falls and has no one to help him up!”