I'd like to share a lesson and opportunity with you that I have learned! It might save you the trouble and frustration that I went through!
My husband and I went to a conference that we had looked forward to for months! The conference was attended by hundreds of people and had amazing praise, fantastic teaching, and much needed fellowship opportunities.....there was only one little "fly in the ointment".
You know how you can have something that you value greatly but it's obvious that others don't think so highly of it? We went to this conference with great expectations and then had a situation that I had to deal with in my spirit. A young couple sat in front of us and while the woman was really "into" every aspect of the conference the man appeared to only be there with the woman!
I was really caught up in the spirit moving at the time and only slightly aware of this specific couple the first few times, but every session and every day we went into the conference out of hundreds of people the couple kept sitting in front of us, no matter where we sat! We sat to the front, there they were, to the back, yes they were there too! To the left or to the right it didn't matter, there they were!
By the last evening they had finally really registered in my atmosphere! The man was sitting directly in front of me and I had to get around his obvious boredom to get into a praise attitude! He looked around at everything going on, appearing bored and distracted, it was hard to not notice!....I began to pray for the young woman he was with, "If you're not married to him, don't marry him! he's not a Christian like you! Your life will be one long struggle!"...but then God (don't you love those words?!) told me to pray for the man, I wrestled with that a bit. Do you wrestle with it when God tells you to do something you don't want to do? It's better to just go with it, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble!
As the preaching was drawing towards the end I leaned over to Lane and told him I needed to pray for this man before we left. Small, independent groups praying at the conference was not really something they wanted, so I had to move and do it fast. As we all stood up and were dismissed I reached over the chair the young man had been sitting in and touching his arm i told him that I had sat behind him several times now and he really reminded me of my nephew(It was all I had as an ice-breaker!) and "I wondered if I could just pray a word of blessing over him as an aunt"? He was very open for that!
I prayed a word of blessing and I added "a new deeper walk with his Heavenly Father". I had accomplished my assignment that easily! I could feel a satisfaction in my spirit that the seed words were planted! Why didn't I do this the first time I noticed him and was irritated with his boredom? We picked up our bibles, notebooks and things and left the row where we were sitting but the young woman came and caught us and told us "thank you so much" for that word of prayer, it was a small word to us, but in her world it was evident that it was big!
Now the moral, every good story needs a moral, right? Don't be irritated by those less spiritually mature, pray for them, give them a hand up to a higher level, boost them, don't push them back! .....And if you do this earlier in a conference you may remove irritations that will follow you through the weekend!
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