Leading With LimitationsSample

When Jesus became human, He went from being omnipresent to just being present. He went from having an awareness of all places and all times to walking around in the foothills of Galilee and Judea.

When we log into social media and become engrossed in our feeds, we go from being present wherever we are to launching our attention onto something somewhere else in the world. When we do this, we lose awareness of our immediate surroundings.

At the extreme end, this is why “distracted driving” claimed 3,308 lives in 2022. At the less extreme end, this is why, without even looking, most of us can now recognize others’ sudden lack of response in conversation as a sign that they’ve been absorbed by their phone and are now “somewhere else.”

Today, this is the normal state of affairs. To quote again from Dr. Turkle, “We turn away from each other and toward our phones. We are forever elsewhere.”

When the Apostle Paul encourages believers to follow Jesus’s example in Philippians 2, he is talking specifically about Jesus’ humility: Jesus left his exalted position to come walk around on our planet, where He asked thoughtful questions to people, invited others to follow Him, and brought healing to many. But underlying all of this was Jesus’ careful, intentional presence with the people around Him.

In 1942, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Her words ring even truer today; in our age of almost continual distraction, taking time to give the people around us our full focus and attention means giving them a rare and precious gift. It communicates to them that they matter, that their perspective matters, and that being with them is the most important thing to us right now.