'multi-tasking'

Like most of my days, the larger part of today was filled with people. Talking, praying, meeting with people.

Sometimes here in the privacy of the room that's called our Pastoral Office. Sometimes in the privacy of a person's home.

Listening to them. Listening with them. Listening for them.

The Lord is always present. He's at work, unseen, and most times too unheralded, in people's lives. I'm listening all the time to try and figure out not just where they are at, but, more to the point where He is at: indeed, exactly what He's at.

It's demanding work in its own particular way. I'm interested that often at the time of prayer we have each morning here, I'm prayed for by the others in terms of the so-called multi-tasking that I do.

I smile a bit at that, since it's meant to be only women who are up to such multi-tasking. But that aside, I'm grateful for the prayer along those lines, because in truth it is a particular sort of multi-tasking that I'm doing.

I'm having to listen in two directions at once.

I'm listening intently to what the person is saying: I'm seeking to follow exactly what it is they're trying to say, in both the words they use, and in what they're not saying too.

And I'm listening intently as well to what the Lord himself is saying through it all: and what it is that he wants said by me. It requires a fair amount of constant concentration.

But it has its rewards! Being aware of the Lord so at work in the lives of these people; seeing him at work, and speaking, in the talking back and forth that's going on; knowing as I pray with folk that God's own hand is somehow at that moment being stretched out and laid with grace upon a person's life.

In at least a couple of instances here today the person I was seeing was not entirely clear just why they had come 'knocking at my door'. They just had a sense that they needed to come, were meant to come. And I don't doubt for a moment that that was indeed the case.

There was a reason. There were things that the Lord needed to say.

There were marvelous answers to prayer.

There were moments of revelation: an insight afforded which prompted the person to say they wished that they had met me a good ten years before.

There was healing and help being afforded; renewal and growth being seen.

There were burdens being shared, commitments being made, and friendships being fostered in Christ.

Who ever thought that the work of a pastor was dull?!