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.