Being Present

So there I was at the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta and God is all over me. 13,000 believers worshipping together and listening to some of the most influential speakers in the world today speaking on Leadership. As is bound to happen at these events we start comparing what we are hearing to what is going on at our local church and surprise, we find it lacking. Now, there are about 10 of us here from our church and I can see all of us trying to get an audience with our pastor in order to "encourage" some changes. After all, it is important that changes come from him because we are "merely" the worker bees. There is a little grumbling starting to build when suddenly the Holy Spirit begins to talk to me. He takes me to Acts and the story of Stephen.  Remember him? He was the guy in Acts 6 that gets chosen to serve on tables and to make sure the Greek widows got as much food as the Hebrew widows. In essence, he is a waiter assigned to prevent cat fights between the old gals. He could have seen his job as "merely" working for the Big Guys and waiting on tables. Only, he didn't look at it that way. He had had the Apostles lay hands on him and as far as he was concerned he was a minister of hope. So, at the beginning of chapter 7, this waiter is doing "great wonders and miraculous signs". Hey buddy, don't you know that that is the job of the Apostles? Your job is to keep the bickering widows from killing each other. So then it hits me, being present (the theme of Catalyst 2011) means not waiting for leadership to give marching orders or talking them into picking up the gauntlet. Being present is to just to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit and do whatever He tells you to do in the moment. Stephen was fully present and the Lord worked just as powerfully through him as He did through the Apostles. Whatever our day job we are all called to be ministers of hope. We are called to respond to the Holy Spirit in the moment and allow Him to work through us. Be present.