This is a guest post from my friend Jonathan Pearson, Orangeburg Campus Pastor at Cornerstone Community Church and Assistant Director of The Sticks Network. He’s also the co-creator of MillennialLeader.com, an online community for young leaders. Jonathan’s written a new book, Next Up: 8 Shifts Great Young Leaders Make. Trust me…it’s a book you want to read.

 

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We’re better together.

That sounds like a line from a romantic comedy, but it’s so much more than that. The idea that we’re better when we work together and when we’re doing life together is one that is true in every relationship sense and in every area of our lives.

We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

We’ve been to the place where someone disappoints us or we don’t get something from someone or something when we expect and we retreat to ourselves. We get so upset at the faults of others or even ourselves that we pull back and retreat to solitude. The result, when left alone for too long, is the life begins to fall out of us… little by little.

We need others. We’re better together.

We see the example of Jesus. He would retreat for short times to be with the Father, but other than that, he always had people around him. He had 12 that he did life with. Why? It was definitely because of the mission that he was calling them to, but it was also because he knew that he was made for relationship with other people. That even the Son of God needed people around him to live life with.

No matter what you do, how old you are, what your career is, or your family situation, you need people around you. For those of us that find ourselves in a place of leadership, we need people around us to hold us up, to hold up, and to walk through life with. We need people to bounce ideas off of, to glean from, and to encourage us.

We can’t live in retreat.

We can’t live in life alone.

We need each other.

Find good people to put yourself around.

They don’t have to be just like you… Jesus’ weren’t like him.

They don’t have to be perfect… they won’t be.

They just need to be there.

You just need them there.

You just need to be there for them.

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Read more about topics like this in Jonathan’s book Next Up: 8 Shifts Great Young Leaders Make. To find out more about the book, go to nextupbook.com. To find out more about Jonathan go to JonP.me.