The Gift of Difficult People in Your Life

I have come to the conclusion that if you do not have any difficult people in your life, God will issue you one. In fact God will probably issue you more than one. But I have also learned something else about difficult people—they are a gift. Perhaps a gift in odd wrapping paper with the bow all askew, but a gift nonetheless.

    The gift comes as the problem person helps you deal with the rough edges in your own life. And that is it. You don't get the privilege of fixing the other person. You just get to deal with yourself.

    This is not a new issue and it will continue as long as there are people. I would like to share an example from scripture and then return to consider the practical implications of this for your daily life. The best example of problem people found in scripture comes with the two titans of the early Christian church Peter and Paul.

    Paul had been Saul the persecutor of the faith. That would have been enough to cheese off the quick-to-react, slower-to-think Peter. It probably only made matters worse that Saul who was renamed Paul by Jesus in a vision was a scholar from a well to do family while Peter was a poor, rough around the edges fisherman. But the nails in the coffin of their relationship were surely the way Paul didn't expect Gentile converts to follow Moses law.

    Both Peter and Paul were faithful Jews. But Paul had been shown by God that Gentiles could follow Jesus without taking on all the dietary and other Jewish laws. Peter strongly disagreed and the two occasionally clashed as we can read in scripture. For example, in his Letter to the Galatians, Paul writes of Peter using the Hebrew version of his name which is Cephas. "But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self condemned."

    Peter and Paul opposed one another face to face. The two didn't like being around each another and yet God kept bringing them together. And eventually the two would end up in Rome at the same time and were both put to death by the Emperor Nero who blamed the burning of Rome on Christians. Nero showed that he didn't give a fiddle about the new faith by having Peter crucified (upside down at Peter's request) and the Roman citizen Paul beheaded. Peter and Paul ticked each other off and yet one didn't get rid of the other all the way to death and beyond.

    God used Paul to bring up the issue of Jewish law for Peter. Peter came through his contact with Paul and later a centurion named Cornelius to be open to the vision God gave him that all things were clean and new converts did not have to keep to the old law (see Acts 10). It did take both Paul and Cornelius for Peter to deal with this issue within himself. Remember I did say that God would give you a difficult person and probably more than one. Peter knows what I mean.

    But Peter did come to change and eventually could even point people to Paul's advice as godly words of wisdom. In the letter we call Second Peter, Peter refers in the third chapter to "our beloved Paul" who writes "according to the wisdom given him." True he says that some of what Paul writes is hard to understand and gets twisted by some people, but give Peter a break here. This is real progress.

    Moving beyond scripture, we find that the Christians who have had to face this more than any are the monks and nuns who live in cloistered communities. Enclosed on the grounds without the ability to find another church, get another job or otherwise avoid the difficult people in their monastery, the religious communities learned how to receive the gift of problem people. And what they found was that the people who get on your nerves are able to do so because of something within you. The people who bother you bring up issues within yourself that you don't want to face. And as you face that issue and deal with the problems within, the person's habits can come to seem eccentric, or even a nuisance, but they don't have to lead to anger and hatred.

    You may never make peace with the problem person, but you should be able to make peace within yourself as you deal with that person. I have written in this space some years back about how to do so with a simple prayer: "Bless [name of problem person]. Change me." Begin to pray, really pray for the difficult people in your workplace, class, Bible study or other group. I once prayed a bad boss into a happy marriage and a move to Switzerland. I kid you not. But I didn't get to get her gone until I came to terms with some of what she brought up in me. And you won't be able to get all the problem people in your life shuttled off to Switzerland either. It's just not that big a country and the Alps would be crushed under the weight of the problematic personalities anyway.

     And here is the final thing to realize before you begin to pray for the difficult coworker and others who stress you out: You are someone else's problem person. I know you are a smart person who works to get along with others. I know this because you have read this far into a column on dealing with difficult folks. But I also know humans and as fun to be around as you are, there is somebody who finds that you get on their last nerve.

    You are God's gift to that person. And how you deal with the difficulties in your own life may well provide him or her with a healthy pattern for dealing with you. That's what makes "Bless [name], change me" such a wonderful prayer. Sooner or later, someone will be praying for you to be blessed.

    (The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.) 

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