Audience of One

This weekend, I had the chance to meet a delightful woman named Kathe Wunnenberg.

I attended one of her workshops and had the chance to meet with her one-on-one for fifteen minutes, and between the two, she prayed for me, gave me a gift, blessed my socks off, and filled me full of ideas and thoughts I'll be chewing on for weeks to come.

But here's the thing I appreciated the most about Kathe. She is an author and has a speaking ministry, but it's clear she hasn't let any of it go to her head. She taught (by example, no less) the importance of investing in small numbers for the greater good.

It doesn't matter if you speak or write or do any one of a hundred other things; you're taught by just about everyone to grow your numbers, your platform, and your fame, basically. Right? Isn't that the dream everyone urges you to pursue? Figure out how to make your posts go viral, get the most likes or votes, win the contests?

That's not what Kathe taught. (And she wasn't the only one that weekend. I wanted to stand on a table and applaud for ALL OF THEM who dared to say such things.)

Kathe said, "A soul is a soul. It doesn't matter how many people God is calling you to. Be faithful to them. An audience of one is still a precious platform."

She said that during her workshop, and later that day, I was her audience of one. I sat knee to knee with her at the end of a long hallway filled with hopeful writers and speakers, each hoping to make a winning connection. Well, most hoping for that, anyway. I wasn't one of them in that moment. It was okay with me if Kathe never remembered me after I stood up and walked away. But for those fifteen minutes, I was determined to learn everything I could from her. I scribbled notes in my color-coded binder and gulped her knowledge as she willingly poured it out to an audience of one.

To me.

It had been a long day, and I'm sure there were many things Kathe could have done with those fifteen minutes. A bathroom break, for starters. Coffee refill? Quick call home? Lap around the building to stretch? And yet she sat in cramped little quarters to hear the questions of this girl from Indiana who was hungry to learn.

She lived her words in that moment. A soul is a soul, and mine learned from hers right then. She was faithful to me. She saw me (I could see it in her eyes) as a precious platform.

So in whatever you're doing these days, do you know that your audiences of one matter just as much (if not more) than the ones that push your numbers higher? Because they do. They're precious platforms. Be faithful to them.