Difficult People (Part 2)

Author Brooks Faulkner identifies nine types of difficult people with these humorous nicknames.  See if any of these seem familiar:

1. The sherman tank will run right over you.

2. The star performer is entitled to your preferential treatment.

3. The megaphone will talk your ear off.

4. The bubble buster deflates everyone’s enthusiasm.

5. The volcano has a temper like Mt. St. Helen’s.

6. The cry baby is a chronic complainer.

7. The nit picker is an unpleasable perfectionist.

8. The backbiter is a mater of calculated rumor

9. The space cadet is on a different wavelength.

Some of those descriptions have a ring of truth!  We do have people in our lives, and within our women’s ministries, who take advantage of us, who hurt us, who are critical and impossible to please, and who never have enough of our attention. BUT behind the difficult people of life is God, who has ordained the circumstances of our life.  God has, in His perfect purpose, put difficult people in our lives for His glory and our good.  He uses them as sandpaper to refine us–to help us grow and become more Christlike.  Roy Hession (in The Calvary Road) says that God tests us, using difficult people to make us humble and broken before Him.  God will allow problem people to come into our lives so that we will learn to depend more on His power and not our own resources. He uses them to encourage us to pray, to trust His Word and depend on His Spirit for love and grace. If that is true, then to not honor them is to not honor God.

Certainly, responding in a Christ-like manner to difficult people often requires us dying to our own selfish desires as we strive to love and serve them–and that is a good thing. Someone once said “Difficult people are the nails which keep us on the cross.“

So expect difficult people–accept them, and let God use them in your life.

Difficult People (Part 1)

Have you ever considered the parable of the tares and the wheat in relation to the difficult people in your life and within your women’s ministry?  The parable found in Matthew 13:24-30 talks about how the enemy sows tares in the wheat field.  Satan plants counterfeit Christians (tares) in the world.  This passage teaches that in the midst of God’s people, there are those that are not genuine Christians. “Tares have the same color, shape and fragrance as wheat, but no heads of grain form.  …Tares soak up the nutrients, they take up space, but they produce nothing in return and are unidentifiable until harvest time.” (Jon Courson)

Most of the time, we don’t really know who is truly a part of God’s kingdom and who is not.  There are those who, from all appearances, seem to be true believers.  They are involved, they carry their Bible and even use Christian “lingo” and join us in prayer.  But they are tares.  Satan has planted them within the kingdom to cause confusion and problems.  But unless we get specific discernment from the Lord, we have no idea whether the difficult people we encounter were “planted” by the enemy to cause problems and division, or whether God put them there to be ministered to by us.

It could be that both are true–the enemy wants to use them, but God wants us to minister to them.  And our godly response to these difficult people should be the same–we are to love people, whether friend or enemy. No matter how difficult the person, it is our job to love (through the power of the Holy Spirit), and God’s job to judge.