This morning I downloaded Joyce Meyer Ministries from the App Store and began listening while I entered invoices into our accounting software system at work.  I have always enjoyed Joyce and found her preaching to be right on the mark.  (Others may not agree, but my blog is not the place for a debate.  If you aren’t a fan of Joyce Meyer, you are welcome to move right along to another site.)

Today’s message was Part 1 of Loving Difficult People.  We all have difficult people in our lives we are forced to deal with, whether it’s an irritating coworker or someone known for smarting off at you every chance they get.  We can leave our place of employment or attempt to avoid the offender at all cost but there is no getting away from difficult people as we will continue to encounter them all throughout our lives.  The challenge here is to LOVE them even while they are being difficult.  Whew.  This is not a small task at times, is it?

Here’s a thought – maybe WE are even someone else’s “difficult person.”  How’s that for taking a step back and locking eyes with the person in the mirror.   Hmmm.  It gives us something to think about, doesn’t it?

The thing is to love the person, even when they are being difficult or hard to get along with.  Maybe give yourself some time to analyze why they are being difficult in certain situations.  While we can’t read someone else’s mind and know their heart, we can try to put ourselves in their shoes from time to time.

Something Joyce said this morning in her message moved me to jot it down on my yellow legal pad I keep on my desk for notes.

“You can feel like doing the wrong thing and still choose to do the right thing.”  Joyce Meyer  

Let’s be honest.  When someone cuts you off in traffic, there are times you might want to give them the one finger wave when they look back in the rearview mirror at you.  We have all felt rage well up inside of us, but we can choose NOT to let it take charge.  Because we are human, we want to get back at them, but because we are Christians, we are to love them even when they do such things to us.  You have free will, so of course you could rage at them.  However, it takes a much stronger person to choose to extend grace to them.

We truly don’t know what people are going through in their lives to know why they act the way they do.  Some may have just had a hard day at work or maybe even received bad news.  Maybe they aren’t really thinking of cutting you off at all.  They could just be in their own heads due to the information they learned through a disturbing phone call and the vehicle moves over into your lane giving the appearance of just down right being ugly to you when that wasn’t their intent at all.

It’s so easy to jump to conclusions on why this person was being difficult with you.  It is much harder to extend grace and act in love.  The choice is yours, and doing the right thing will leave you feeling wonderful in the end.

Think about this the next time you want to have a knee jerk reaction.