With my laptop broken and my gaming computer in Cincinnati, I've had a few hours of downtime to just read and contemplate. I am almost finished with my current book, "The Story We Find Ourselves In," and I constantly find myself nodding along with Brian McLaren's characters as they engage in spiritual conversation. In chapter 26, McLaren spent some time ruminating on the actions of the Holy Spirit in the life of a genuine follower of Christ. He comes up with three central actions of the Holy Spirit:

1) [God's Spirit] tries to be himself in you, while you're being yourself. In other words, he tries to live in you, so that you become a more Christlike person. I know that the word 'Christian' means a lot of different things to different people, but it's supposed to mean 'Christlike person,' and I think that's the first thing that the Holy Spirit wants to do inside you.

2) I think that the Spirit motivates you and guides you and empowers you to be part of the mission. I think that each person experiences this in a different way. In one person, the Holy Spirit energizes the desire to teach, and in another person, he gives an ability to care for the poor or to raise and give away money to good causes. Another person finds the Spirit motivating him to try super-difficult things.

3) The third thing is that the Holy Spirit tries to connect you with other people, so that what he does in and through each person is coordinated with what he does in and through another person, and so on. That way, it's not just a bunch of individuals working on the same cause, but it's people really united in one Spirit. And that's what the community of faith is supposed to be.

I would add one more:

4) the Spirit teaches us to embrace the Kingdom, guides us into the Kingdom and guides us to live out of it, and comforts us and speaks to us and basically lives life alongside us, whether we're preaching behind a pulpit or running a cash register at midnight. It doesn't really matter.