Leverage

Leverage

“You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.” The second is equally important: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” No other commandment is greater than these.

“HOW CAN I HELP YOU, and how can I pray for you?” Tara leaned in slightly from across our table, waiting to hear what I might request, ready to leverage her connections to help me and sincere in her offer of prayer.

Tara and I meet over lunch roughly twice a year. Similar in age and motivation, we share a love for Jesus and have been cheerleading one another’s adventures in work and ministry for a long time. She ends our meeting the same way every time, asking whether I need an introduction to anyone, asking whether I have any roadblocks that she or someone she knows might know how to solve. She generously offers to leverage her resources to assist me in reaching my goals. And I do the same in return. It’s admittedly a fun process—brainstorming one another’s needs, asking whether she knows so-and-so does such and such and offering to connect her. Leveraging connections and knowledge works out well for both of us, and we leave our lunch with new ideas, new potential connections, and perhaps a new perspective on something we’ve been struggling with.

And while it’s easy to think of leverage mostly in business terms, assuming we don’t have anything of value to offer, that’s not true. Leverage is simply responding to the needs of another, offering assistance with our time, skill sets, connections, and resources. We leverage our skills when we make an extra big batch for dinner so that we can take a meal to a friend recovering from surgery. We leverage our time when we sit quietly, listening to someone’s story, being intentionally present when life is hard. We leverage our faith when we pray for someone else, standing alongside her spiritually, asking God to provide exactly what she needs. The truth is, when we leverage what God has entrusted us with to help those around us, we are loving our neighbors as ourselves, just as God commanded.

Lord, show us the resources, the skill sets, the networks we can leverage for those around us. May we be generous toward others, just as you’ve been generous toward us. Amen.

-Julie

One Good Step: Who will you leverage your time, skill sets, or resources for today?