Don’t Stop Believin’

Are you sitting down? I saw Journey in concert this weekend!!! Journey, y’all!!! Journey!

It was amazing. I never had the opportunity to attend one of their concerts in the 80’s and let me say, it was so worth the wait. I discovered two things Friday night in my journey 🙂…

the best thing… seeing Journey in concert is not your typical concert – the entire show is a sing-a-long.  Most of us know all the words to every single song. All their songs were and still are, awesome.

the worst thing… someone at the concert got a little cranky and wanted to fight with me.

Well, this someone who I politely tapped on the shoulder, turned around and verbally, wasn’t the least bit understanding of my request for them to please move over. It was a scene straight out of Meet the Parents – the “I’m watching you” gesture, you know the gesture. Yeah, I decided not to make any eye contact or say anything else. You just can’t rationalize with crazy. There is strength in silence.

People are hard to love. I certainly didn’t feel any sort of love for someone who was pretty much eyeball-bullying me for the next couple of hours. How on earth are we supposed to love everyone? Do you know that God even asked me to pray for this person – at a JOURNEY concert – pray for the mean person!? Seriously, ask me to do something else Lord, anything else, but praying for this person is not on my mind, they are not nice and I am trying to sing here – we are singing Faithfully and I LOVE this song!!

You know what I did? You know what I did.

I pulled it together and prayed for them. I opened my heart before praying in that moment, because praying with a callused heart doesn’t accomplish anything. It wasn’t about me having a lovey-dovey feeling for this person (I did not), it was about loving God and being obedient to what he whispered to me that night – Pray for them. Ouch. Double ouch.

You guys know that when someone tries to knock us down, that when God asks us to do what seems like an absolutely crazy thing at the moment – pray for the mean person – that it must be a serious request of us. Something is about to happen. He is asking us to do something that usually would not be our first natural response. Or probably even our last.

I don’t know what my prayer at that moment did for them, if anything. Maybe it got them home safely. Maybe they woke up the next morning just as mean as they were that night. I don’t know or even need to know. It wasn’t about me. Maybe it wasn’t even really about them. It was however, all about Him. It always is. He comes to us Faithfully, with Open Arms, and whispers Don’t Stop Believin’. Yup. That’s our God.

We love because he first loved us.  – 1 John 4:19   NIV