“Great leaders make great sacrifices.”

That John Maxwell quote has resonated with me significantly lately.

Example A.

Five other Springfield men, my dad and I went to the Dominican Republic last week to plan, strategize with Team Gathering from around the states and see the work of www.missionemanuel.org (an outreach under our umbrella).

We met Anna on Friday and she serves as the point person of the health clinic at Mission Emanuel. She graduated from OSU and has a master’s in administration.

Her heart, compassion and leadership was easily visible. Any businessman I know in our region would hire her in a heartbeat for multiple positions I would guess.

She is an excellent communicator, highly educated, and has a heart of gold. As one team member said, “She’d make $80k back home.”

Her total budget in the DR, counting travel, expenses and salary is a whopping $20k.

A major takeaway from the trip for me was the clear delineation of leadership there compared to here.  The leaders were obvious. Positions and titles weren’t as important as simply following with great respect.

We look for reasons to not follow, obey and to rebel against leadership on all levels typically. In a city of 3.5 million, I’m sure Santo Domingo has its leadership issues, I just know in my five days with our sister ministry, I didn’t see it.

Whether it was John, Javier, Immanuel, Anna, Jack, leadership served, people followed, and lives were changed and are changing.

I can speak on this, my life was changed.

A quick experiment.  This week’s MMM will be sent to roughly 2500. If each person sent a check of $10 to (address below), we could fulfill her annual budget. That’s right, pretty simple.

The Gathering/USA / c/o Anna Bianco / 1220 E. Concord Street / Orlando, FL 32803

We’ll start the charge with $250.

There’s a price for superior leadership. I saw great sacrifice in the DR. And Anna is a excellent, count-the-cost leader, one any Ohioan could be proud of, and then some.