I agree with Italophile and Stefan.
The key here is the setting for paragraph styles that lets you set the style to be used in the following paragraph.

You could create a new style with space before to use as the style following and then have your general body text or normal style set as the style to follow that.
Have the new style be based on the style you use for your body text so that changes in that base style will cascade into the new one. To the reader, they will be indistinguishable.

How styles in Microsoft Word cascade by Shauna Kelly