How To Prepare Ourselves To Deal With Difficult People And Love the Unlovable
Facing Difficult People
Facing difficult people starts at an early age. I remember picking up my oldest daughter from school one day when she was in the first grade. She got in the car, slammed the door, and started crying. I asked what happened. She told me how another child mistreated and embarrassed her because her teacher called on her to write on the chalkboard instead of the other child. This minimal incident introduced my six-year-old daughter to life facing difficult people.
You might imagine that as a mom, I also did not like how the other child treated my daughter. You know how us Mama’s are. You can mess with me, but don’t mess with my kids. However, I was an adult who also had the Holy Spirit living in me to remind me that I needed to teach my daughter the best way to handle this situation. I assured her that the other child’s actions were not appropriate towards her, but that forgiving her and loving her in spite of her unkind actions would be the best way to deal with this.
The reality is, facing difficult people is inevitable. How we deal with them matters.
“Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God,
and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”
1 John 4:7
Love one another sounds right and good, and we all know we should. However, we live in a world where love one another is not easy. People can be hard to get along with, and love one another can easily slip through the cracks. If we do anything, we often encounter difficult people shopping, eating out, at school, and at work. Of course, sometimes those difficult people reside very close to our heart as friends and family.
How about ourselves?
Have you ever been the hard-to-get-along-with person? I hate to admit it, but I know I have been the difficult person before. Maybe it was a difficult season and I was under a lot of stress. Then things didn’t all go as I wanted, and before I know, love one another was the last thing on my mind. I am not proud of it, but when I encounter someone with a bad attitude, I struggle with wanting to throw their attitude right back at them. Not only does that do no one any good, but it also doesn’t show Jesus living in me.
He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
1 John 4:8
Honestly, I believe God allows us to be confronted with difficult people as a training ground to learn to love when loving isn’t easy. Since we belong to Jesus, we want to emulate His ways and His character. In Luke 6:27, Jesus said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” Jesus lived that out by loving and dying for His enemies.
In Luke 6:27-36, Jesus covered many aspects of doing good to people who wrong us. We will be wronged in this life and in those times, we have a choice to make. Are we going to get angry and give them what they deserve? Or are we going to let God grow our character and maybe even use us to reveal His love to another?
Pre-Jesus Days
Thinking back to my pre-Jesus days, being the difficult person came easy and natural to me. Loaded down with sin and shame, I lived angry about the mess of my life even though it was a mess of my own making. Over the past twenty-seven years, Jesus transformed my life in a huge way, but I still battle with that old difficult person inside when life doesn’t go as I think it should.
About nine years ago, my husband and I paid someone to do a job for us. The job did not come close to meeting my expectations. I was so upset that I lost control of my thoughts and feelings. I confronted the man in a way that was not who I wanted to be or how I wanted to act. I didn’t use any ugly language, but I was ugly none the less. After the confrontation, the Holy Spirit convicted me that I misrepresented Jesus. However, I justified it with the money we paid and that I had not used foul language.
Three years ago, my husband and I started another project. Our contractor sent one of his sub-contractors for the first stage of our project. The man I contemptuously confronted six years earlier was the first man on the job.
All I could think was, HOW LIKE GOD!
I had never done what I knew I should have done. I never apologized for my behavior. I knew this was God giving me the opportunity to make it right and while I knew this would not be easy, I also knew Philippians 4:13.
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:13
The first day he was on the job, I was sick the whole day trying to figure out what to say and when to say it. The first day ended without my apology. However, my opportunity came on the second day. I apologized for how I acted toward him six years before and he graciously accepted my apology.
I tell this story because remembering our own shortcomings and need for others to extend grace to us at certain points in our lives, reminds us that others deserve that same grace. It’s so much easier to extend grace to others when we remember that someone extended grace to us. This helps us when we face difficult people.
Let us go back to love one another from 1 John 4:7 and connect it with Romans 12:18.
If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men.
Romans 12:18
God’s word continually reminds us that loving others isn’t based on their attitudes and actions toward us. But instead, God calls us to live a life of loving others even if and when they really don’t deserve it. If someone hurts us with their words or mistreats us, we base our response and reactions on knowing, hearing, and responding to God’s word as our foundation and guide for the life that we live.
Grace Extended
The truth is, God is with us and He continually extends grace and mercy to us. He extends grace to us when we ourselves are the unloving person and when we face an unloving person. God’s calling for us is to rise higher than the unloving person we’ve been in the past, and rise higher than the unloving person we will face in the future. God extends His grace and fills us with His power to rise above ugliness and injustice. And through us, He reveals His love to others when we love one another.
When God allows us to be confronted with difficult people, we have a choice to make. Are we going to get angry and give them what they deserve? Or are we going to let God grow our character and reveal His love to others?
If we want our default response based in love one another, we need to prepare ourselves with a mental commitment to love one another before facing difficult people. Being prepared may change your day and theirs too.
Ways To Prepare Ourselves And Love The Unlovable
I) Write down a time when you were the difficult person.
Sometimes being honest with ourselves about ourselves is the hardest step of all, but it can be a great tool to help you in future encounters with others.
Use this as a way of remembering that every single one of us needs grace extended to us at different times in our lives.
II) Know what God says about how He calls us to respond to others mistreating us.
Read 1 John 4:7-8, Luke 6:27-36, Romans 12:18, Philippians 4:13
If you happen to be in a situation where you are facing a difficult person daily, I suggest writing all these Scriptures out and keeping them in a place you can go to every time you need a reminder.
III) Pray for God to give you the ability to see the positive qualities in difficult people.
Prayer helps us focus on God and His ways and helps us rise above any ugliness and injustice.
Seeing the good in others helps us shift the focus from the bad to the good. Focusing on the good benefits everyone. Use those positive qualities you identify as a way of speaking positively towards them. Often times this can diffuse a precarious situation.
I created a free resource for you to be able to download, print out, and practice these steps. Click her to get your free resource 👉🏻 How To Prepare Ourselves To Deal With Difficult People And Love the Unlovable.
