Walking in love

Joyce Meyer had an interesting column last week about putting God's love in your relationships. She shared a story about how God convicted her of her selfish ways:

I used to feel as if I was fighting the devil from daylight till dark, seven days a week. One morning about 11 years ago I discovered that the primary reason for my struggle was that I wasn’t walking in love.

My husband, Dave, and I had just returned from doing a conference. We went to McDonald’s to have some coffee and read our mail. Both of us were very tired.

When I’m tired, I like to sit in the sun to be revived. But in order to sit in the sun, we needed to sit in one of the booths near the windows, and by the time we arrived, there was only one left. So Dave said, 'You go get the booth, and I’ll go get the coffee.'

As I started walking, I saw out of the corner of my eye a little old man heading for the same booth. I stepped up my pace a bit and beat him to it. Fortunately, he knew the lady who was sitting in the booth right behind us and asked if he could sit with her.

She answered, 'Yeah, you can sit here. She beat you to it, huh?'

The worst part of the story is that the man was crippled.

God convicted me right then and there. 'Aren’t you cute?' He asked me. 'Here you are, a born-again, baptized-in-the-Holy-Ghost preacher, in the middle of teaching an ‘anointed’ series on love, and you’re racing a crippled man for the last seat at McDonald’s!'

Meyer goes on to say that by giving up the need to be right, she has been more in tune with the needs of others -- and has had much better relationships as a result.