‘What is the Lord doing in your town?’

It was a few months ago and I was chatting with a man from a coastal community in the North. We were both on our own and had stopped for coffee and begun to talk. He’d told me a bit about himself – where he was from and also that he was a church warden in his church.

‘Well’ he replied, ‘it’s a really hard place. There’s lots of drink and drugs and difficulties…’ And he then went on to tell me about all sorts of difficult things in his town. He didn’t realise it, but despite me asking what the Lord was doing, he was telling me what the Lord was not doing! 

So I asked him again, and said, ‘that’s really interesting. So in the midst of all that, what is God doing?’ At the point he paused and took a while to think. And then he began to tell me about some great things going on – of food banks feeding the underprivileged; of people becoming Christians and of church leaders praying together. 

I’ve thought about that conversation a few times since then. I suspect that many disciples in the North are like that man. Even when asked to see the positive things, we see the negative. Our thinking is on what God is not doing, as opposed to what he is doing. 

What we need is a mind-set change. We need to think different.

I’ve shown The Belfrey staff the 1997 apple ad, ‘Think Different’ twice recently. Why? Because we need a mind-set change (Romans 12:2). We need to see what the Spirit of God is doing and join in. We need to share testimonies and stories of these things and then learn the lessons of the testimony so we think different.

If we can think different, we can live different. And if we live different, we can change the world.