A Regular Practice That Keeps Your Accessibility from Becoming a Liability

…the report of his power spread even faster, and vast crowds came to hear him preach and to be healed of their diseases. But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.

(Luke 5:15–16, Bible New Living Translation)

Accessibility to people comes with two primary liabilities:

1) People start getting to you

I don’t mean people start getting to you because they have access to you.

I mean they start getting to you. Can you hear the difference? You’ll know when a few different symptoms arise:

• Molehills become mountains.
• Everything’s an issue.
• People become problems to be solved, rather than souls with similar needs.

2) You start getting to people (and not in the way you intended)

This one’s harder to detect.

It will usually mean looking past well-worn phrases like “I’m fine” to what their body language says. After all, there’s what people say, and then there’s what people do. It means there may be something they haven’t said yet. It means there’s inevitably going to be a misunderstanding.

Tempting as it is to just avoid people, you cut off the opportunity for meeting the needs that relationships provide in the process.

So how do you maintain your accessibility without it becoming a liability?

The solution is found in who you access.

Jesus withdrew to places that only seemed deserted and lonely.

But what did he do when he withdrew? He prayed. In doing so, he ceased to be alone, because in those places he intentionally accessed God the Father. It was in that time that he was strengthened to go back out to people, accessible as ever, in order to serve them.

May we all access the one who empowers us to live from that same posture.

This post was created with Typeshare