Never allow people to become too familiar with you as familiarity can blind people to the weight, grace, sacrifice, wisdom, and calling on your life.

It makes people handle what is sacred as if it is common.

There is a difference between being approachable and being over-accessible.

Jesus was humble, touchable, compassionate, and present yet He still had boundaries.

He withdrew to pray.  He did not commit Himself to everyone, because He knew what was in man.

“But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men, and needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew what was in man.”   John 2:24–25.

Familiarity becomes dangerous when people become so accustomed to your presence, kindness, gift, labor, prayers, wisdom, or availability that they stop honoring it.

They begin to expect access without reverence, correction without humility, counsel without gratitude, and love without accountability.

Even Jesus experienced this.

When He came to His own hometown, they could not receive Him properly because they had reduced Him to what they “thought” they knew

It is okay to create boundaries, it’s not pride.   Boundaries protect assignment.

Some people only honor distance.  Once they get too much access, they begin to mishandle you.  They start speaking casually about what they once admired.  They stop valuing your counsel.  They feel entitled to your time.  They begin to correct what they have not carried, criticize what they do not understand, and treat your presence as ordinary…

This is why even in ministry, leadership, family, friendship, and work, you must carry yourself with humility but also with spiritual sobriety.

Be loving, but not loose, kind, but not common.

Be available by the Spirit, not by pressure. Be transparent with wisdom, not naked before those who cannot cover you.

Because some people will use access as ammunition.

They will take your tears and make them gossip, take your process and make it a label.

They will take your weakness and use it to discredit your growth, take your openness and call it drama.

They will take your humility and mistake it for permission to dishonor you.

When people become wrongly familiar, they stop seeing you as someone to be respected and start treating you as someone they can “handle” any kind of way..

Shalom
~ Syreeta Thomas

Syreeta Thomas

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