We’ve all probably had an encounter with someone that has gotten under our skin. More likely, there have probably been several encounters throughout our lifetime with a variety of people that have managed to say the wrong thing at the exact moment when you don’t need to hear it and you find yourself wanting to run from the room screaming like a lunatic. Such was the case for me on an ordinary day when I was in a pretty good mood. In fact, I was having an outright fantastic day and then in they walked with their negative attitude and their negative words that came at me like a misguided torpedo obliterating my good mood. Now mind you, I smiled through gritted teeth as I listened to them. I was trying hard not to let anyone steal my joy. However, even I know there are times when you feel like there isn’t enough plastic surgery to hold a fake smile in place and it’s a bit hard being joyful while standing before a firing squad, but that’s what it felt like as word after negative word assaulted my once good mood. Finally, after they’d finished saying all they needed to say, I found myself anxious, tired, and wanting nothing more than to go home.
That of course should have been it, but as we all know, someone’s bad day can often become our own. Therefore, all the way home, I found myself replaying the conversation over in my head and remarking to myself all those words that I’d wished I’d spoken, anticipating telling my husband all about what ridiculous things that person had said.
It’s amazing how the Holy Spirit seems to convict us at the most inopportune moments like when you are intent on enacting revenge in your head and spreading the negativity that someone had placed on you by placing it onto someone else, which in that case would have been my husband. Of course the Holy Spirit wasn’t going to let that happen because it was as if God Himself interrupted my thoughts by saying, “I heard that.” And although I hadn’t spoken a word, I was well aware that God had heard my thoughts and I found myself slightly embarrassed by how angry I’d become over something that I should have been able to let go. I, after all, am well aware that Satan uses what works and it hadn’t been the first time he’d used other people against me, so it was shame on me for falling into Satan’s trap, yet again. With a newfound peace, God reminded me that if Jesus resided in my heart, I better start acting like it and He quickly pointed out that He loved that person, faults and all, just as He loves me, faults and all.
With a new outlook, instead of angrily telling my husband about what had happened that day, I told him that if he ever hears me saying negative words against anyone, he is to stop me by saying, “God loves her” or “God loves him” depending on the offending person.
My husband agreed. Of course I wasn’t willing to leave anything to chance and so I tested my husband with a dry run by bringing up the person from earlier that day and waiting expectantly for him to stop me by saying, “God loves her.”
“Well,” I prompted him . . .
“God loves her,” he laughed knowingly.
Now we fast forward several weeks, with a few practice runs behind us and with a new set of circumstances in front of us. There was a new thorn in my side and so I rattled on and on to my husband about how tired I was of that person’s insults. As he sat in silence, I could hear the complaint in my own voice as the Holy Spirit convicted me into saying, “I know; God loves her”.
Right on cue, in all his wisdom and wanting to make me laugh to ease the way I was feeling, my husband promptly responded, “God loves her, but we don’t.” It worked. I found myself laughing and quickly forgetting the hurtful words of the other person.
I am forever a work in progress, but I certainly am aware that if I am thinking it, God hears it. Then if I speak those negative thoughts into action, Satan will use them to his advantage to hurt me even more so than I am already hurting, so take some unheeded advice. The next time someone gets under your skin, say to yourself, “God Loves Them” and remember, if God can forgive them, so can you.
For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Matthew 6:14-15.