One Thing Is Necessary

Scripture

Luke 10:38–42 (ESV)

Reflection

Anxious and troubled about many things is an accurate description of most leaders on an ordinary day. The things are real. They need doing. Nothing on the list is frivolous, which is exactly what makes the list so hard to argue with.

Martha is not corrected for serving. She is caring for a guest in her own home, which is good work by any measure. What surfaces is the resentment underneath it. She is doing the serving and she wants her sister assigned to help, and by the time she says so, the work has become the thing she is anxious inside of.

Leaders make that same trade constantly. The report that could have waited gets written while the person who needed ten minutes goes unseen. The inbox gets cleared while the decision everyone is waiting on stays unmade. Activity feels like faithfulness, and it has the advantage of being easy to measure.

Deciding what is necessary and then protecting it from what is merely good is stewardship in its most ordinary form. Mary's choice is called the good portion, and it is defended for her rather than left to her to justify. A leader has to do that for their own necessary work, and for the people who report to them.

One thing is necessary is not a call to do less. It is a claim that the items on a list do not carry equal weight, and that a leader who treats them as equal ends up busy, anxious and behind on the only part that mattered.

Practical Application

• Name the one necessary thing in your current stretch of work, plainly enough to say out loud.
• Identify what you are doing instead of it that is good but not necessary.
• Protect someone else's necessary work today from the merely good.

Takeaways

• Good work can crowd out necessary work, and it rarely feels like a mistake while it is happening.
• Treating every good task as equally weighted is how a leader ends up anxious and behind.

Closing Thought

The list was full of good things. Only one of them was necessary.