Dealing with difficult folk

27 June 2010

Luke 9:51-62

When Jesus is reported as beginning his journey to the cross, a new tone emerges. Jesus lays down, in no uncertain terms, the conditions of discipleship to three would-be disciples. Those conditions are tough… and challenge all other allegiances – even family.

As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. (Luke 9:51)

This text bristles with determination to finish the journey, to achieve the job that he set out to do. This determination was necessary because he was going to be dealing with some very difficult people as he moved towards those defining moments in his ministry, which surround the cross and resurrection.

There is no intrinsic geographical pattern or arrangement that takes him from the Galilee to Jerusalem. So, it appears, what we have here is Luke showing us the growing challenges that Jesus would face. An example appears in the opening verses of the section, which shows him suffering rejection by a Samaritan village (9:53) and the reason given was that they were on a journey to Jerusalem.

Luke wants us to understand that Jesus is going to experience strong opposition. He makes it quite clear that James and John’s response to the situation, which is raining down the fires of destruction on inhospitable people, is certainly not an acceptable way to go. Jesus’ instructions are plain… they should shake the dust off their feet in such situations (9.1-6).

Jesus was going to be dealing with some very difficult people as he moved towards the cross and it seems to me that it is a helpful exercise to ask ‘How do we deal with difficult folk?’

Just as some people bring out your best, others do the contrary. In a work context, we have to understand where they are coming from and how we can best work with them. In our families, strategies tend to develop which enable us to operate without constantly referring to the difficulties.

It is clear that life involves meeting many difficult people. Jesus had to deal with them and so do we… and I felt it worthwhile to ask some pertinent questions around ‘Who?’, ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’ and then to see if there are some Christian principles that might be helpful.

Who are the difficult people in our lives?

From the very outset of Jesus’ ministry, there was opposition to – indeed rejection of – what he had come to earth to bring. Here, scarcely a moment passes from when Jesus utters these words and demonstrates his determination to move forward… before he hits a human and organisational roadblock to his success.

The first to reject him were Samaritans and their reason was because he was a Jew. People reject folks for quite superficial reasons … and James and John had a violent and immediate response in mind. Using Elijah’s actions in the Old Testament (2 Kings 1:13-14), they thought turning them to cinder was OK! Jesus refused to react to people in this way… it was contrary to the way God relates to us.

Who are the difficult people in our lives?

Those who prevent us from growing

People are difficult in that they affect us. We are called to grow in life and some folks don’t help us to do that. Living and working with difficult people always involves a great deal of time. The fact that Jesus advised his disciples to shake off the dust from their sandals would mean that they – and we – need to move on sometimes. We must:-

not get caught up in a continuing problem.
be able to ‘let go’ without harshness.
understand our own growth as important to God.

We could turn this upside-down and say that for every wrong action in one direction there is an equal and damaging opposite inaction! Jesus called people to be proactive and to have some sense of call in situations, rather than becoming helpless victims.

Those who injure us

Difficult people often injure others and this requires recognition. Some people operate like a ‘tank’ and they ruthlessly pursue their ends… they work on the principle that the end justifies the means. In this kind of context, we need to carefully:-

understand the behaviour that drives intent to act.
know the dynamics of what is happening.
recognise the controlling aspects of it.

The opposite from the ‘tank’ is the person who is so inactive that they feel they don’t need to do anything. I find it much easier to deal with a ‘tank’ than to deal with the incompetence associated with lack of initiative. One writer identified, ‘The Whiner, the No Person and the Nothing Person.’

They can be defined in terms of:-

Whiners, who abandon all thought of solutions… see everything as increasingly hopeless.
No People, who don’t want to do what they feel has already been attempted… ‘Forget it – we’ve done that… a wasted, lost cause.’ Often it just hasn’t been tried!
The Nothing Person… ‘Fine! Do it your way. Don’t come crying to me if it fails!’ No responsibility.

Those in whom there is no warmth or responsiveness

Another challenging aspect of behaviour is when there is no warmth or responsiveness on their part. This occurs amongst people who feel their task is to be a loyal opposition to ideas and to concepts, no matter what! It is hard to relate to difficult people, who are just plain awkward and unkind. Jesus often faced such opposition.

They often:-

lose contact with reality and do not know how to behave.
are so full of their own need for attention that they lose sight of a helpful relationship.
unfulfilled folks, often lacking in warmth towards others.

That is not to say that life is all about smiles and ‘happiness’ in that less than deep sense, but difficult people make our life less fulfilled… and less able to achieve. This is perhaps where the religious leaders made life tough for Jesus Christ. They not only sat on the edge as he taught and healed people, seeking to find fault, but they did not want to help to find ways forward in terms of how people lived out their everyday lives.

How do we deal with diffucult people?

It is one thing to recognise that we have to deal with difficult people, but quite another to know how to deal with awkward folks. In pastoral ministry, we probably have to be quite specific in sharing time with difficult folks. We might need to make a specific appointment to meet a person… and also to let them know the limited time that is available.

I recall a minister I tried to help, who had a large number of difficult people to deal with… and worked on the ‘First come, first served’ basis. We tried to work this through and the minister discovered it meant making fixed time available in order to be fair to everyone concerned.

I recall a friend who had a business and he employed someone in a repair department. My friend received phone calls from irate customers, complaining about delays. He went down to the repair shop… and found that the customers were right!
When each machine was brought in for repair, it was placed in a storeroom… with the ones that had been brought in earliest being stored near the far wall. He began repairing from the front and so, in a busy period, the machines that came in last were always dealt with first.
Unfortunately, my friend was unable to persuade the employee there was a better way. I am sure you can imagine the end result of this scenario!

The attitude of our Saviour can be helpful when we are dealing with difficult people. Let us look at our possible response and seek to consider this in the light of how Jesus dealt with people.

We can choose to fight with them

Jesus Christ certainly did not take this line of approach and, with difficult and often ‘complex’ individuals, it rarely produces an outcome that is positive. Once again, we would need to say that this is not a case of rolling over and saying ‘OK – whatever you say!’… but it is a matter of positively approaching the situation.

When attacked, don’t counterattack. We may win the battle, but lose the war, as it were.
Avoid defence, explanation and justification. These are tempting, but rarely help to improve the context.
Don’t shut down. Out of fear or to avoid conflict, we can be persuaded to withdraw and not engage whatsoever.

One writer said we should bring out the best of the unhelpful and difficult person. Jesus invariably asked questions or pointed out the positive. He allows his ‘words and deeds’ to speak for themselves… this is not to fight, but to deal positively with difficult people in difficult situations.

We can give them a platform of discontent

Very often a wrong reaction on our part can result in a person being given a platform to be discontented. Take a look at the letters columns of our newspapers and you will see a wide range of people’s discontent. It is vital we recognise that when people are difficult, we have an important task…. to discover the real, often underlying, problem we are dealing with.

Inner-hurts that go back years… the Holy Spirit can reveal to us that much pain which occurs in this world is the result of deep-seated hurts.
Grievances cultivated by situations beyond our control… life is always presenting the unexpected.
Anger which is chanelled through an unrelated conduit. You find yourself in the middle of something which is quite unconnected.

The difficult person often welcomes the opportunity to have a platform on which to build their own sense of anger or unhappiness. It is a dangerous thing to allow or even encourage this to happen by our own actions.

We can keep moving forward

This is the approach of Jesus with his disciples. It was not only true in the context of the Samaritan village, but throughout his ministry. Of course he stopped and took time with people, as with the woman who had been ill for years, even though he was on a journey to Jairus’ house.

Dealing with difficult people can traumatise caregivers. We don’t know when to move on, when to commend someone to another’s care. In terms of ministry and compassionate care, we can’t become so intimately involved in folk’s difficulties that they become dependent upon us. To move forward, we need to:-

avoid exaggerating the effects of difficult people.
be sensitive to the difficult person’s need.
be clear about the larger picture and our greater calling.

To move forward requires patience on our part. James used the illustration of a farmer who needed patience (James 5:7-8). A farmer plants, weeds, waters and cultivates. He acknowledges he cannot hurry the harvest; he knows it will come in due course.

What happens if we are one of them?

We could easily find ourselves in a situation where we focus on the difficult people and can even imagine who they are – forgetting that we might be one of them.

God’s grace is always at work within us and around us… but it is a deep work which helps us to see that we can be part of the problem. There is no greater challenge than seeing our own difficulties transformed to become a positive success to others.

But, for this to occur:-

We need to be honest about ourselves

Some of us can be difficult… in that we are not team players. I recall the story of a team of rowers who were not doing very well. The head of the university department slipped off to Cambridge to watch their rowing team training. He returned and concluded, ‘I’ve figured out the problem… they have eight guys rowing and only one shouting!’

Are we positive or difficult people? We are not called to like everyone and everything each does, but that is quite different from the call of Jesus to love one another. Frederick Beuchner observed in Wishful Thinking, ‘In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of will.’ Love is related to God’s love and so when we lift up ‘unconditional acceptance and unconditional love’, we must always be careful because love has a qualified ‘as I have loved you’ (John 13:34).

Love is the proof of the way we live and this is spelt out by John, ‘Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.’ (1 John 4:7)

God’s love is peculiar and unfathomable. Soren Kierkegaard commented, ‘If anyone thinks that by falling in love or by finding a friend he had learned about Christian love, he is in profound error.’ In his book, Works of Love, he points out the fact that Christian love is marked off from what he calls ‘spontaneous love’ because Christian love endeavours to live at a level that is distinct from need-ridden love.

We must open our mind to change

When we are dealing with complex and difficult needs in others, we try to find positive ways of moving forward. When we consider ourselves, we also need to see what we can do to be more helpful. This might mean:-

going out of our way to be helpful to others.
creating a new ‘can do’ attitude.
being a conscious part of solutions.

I have some good Jewish friends who are often full of humour and in fact they held a charity evening here in Sydney on Jewish humour. They told me a story recently about a service in an old synagogue in Eastern Europe. When the Shema prayer was said, half the worshippers stood up and half remained seated. The half that was sitting started to yell ‘Sit down’ at those standing, and the ones standing yelled ‘Stand up’ to the ones sitting.

The rabbi didn’t know what to do. His congregation suggested he consult a housebound 98 year old man, one of the original founders of their temple. So he went to the nursing home with a representative of each faction.

The one whose followers stood during Shema said to the old man, ‘Is the tradition to stand during this prayer?’ The old answered, ‘No, that is not the tradition.’

The one whose followers sat asked if that was the tradition. ‘No, that is not the tradition,’ the old man replied.
‘But,’ the rabbi said to the old man, ‘the congregation fights all the time, yelling at each other about whether…’
The old man interrupted, exclaiming, ‘THAT… that is the tradition!’

We can turn our awkwardness into a positive contribution

George Müller, the founder of Christian orphanages, wrote, ‘God delights to increase the faith of his children. We ought, instead of wanting no trials before victory, no exercise for patience, to be willing to take them from God’s hand as a means. Trials, obstacles, difficulties, and sometimes defeats, are the very food of faith.’

I recall when I was encouraged by the optician to wear bi-focals. Christian love has something of the bi-focal about it. It sees people we would love in two ways: It sees them close up (the way they are right now); and it sees them down the road (transformed and at a place we would eventually like them to be).

If we are to live our lives above awkwardness, then we choose to take on the tall assignment of Christian love. Leo Tolstoy was the Russian writer who must be considered amongst the greatest of all novelists. His masterpiece, of course, is War and Peace, which is written on such a broad canvas that there are 580 individual characters.

Many of you know of my love of the cinema and the recent film The Last Station, directed by Michael Hoffman and staring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, tells of the final year of this great man’s life.

Tolstoy rejected Christianity early in life and went off to university, seeking only pleasure. In both Moscow and Saint Petersburg, he drank heavily, lived promiscuously and gambled frequently. His ambition was to become wealthy and famous, but nothing satisfied him.

In 1862 he married and they had thirteen children. He was on the verge of suicide and asked whether there was any meaning in life. Tolstoy searched for the answer in every field of science and philosophy. As he looked around, he saw people were not facing up to the basic questions of life. The answer for him came from the ordinary people of Russia – those who were known as the peasants – and also in the essential teaching of Jesus, primarily in the Sermon on the Mount.

His thoughts on religion can be found in A Confession and Other Religious Writings. He was excommunicated from the Russian Holy Synod in 1901, but he was aware of the importance of the God who changes human nature.

What Jesus offers to difficult people is the possibility of transformation and such change becomes meaningful in the light of the direction in which Jesus is travelling – for in the cross and resurrection very difficult people can become the most wonderful in all the world… through the enabling of the Holy Spirit.

Ken Mansfield was the US Manager for Apple Records, the Beatles’ label. He told of the wonderful times he had with them before they broke up in the mid-1980s… then he hit rock bottom and lost everything!

He fell in love and, through the person who eventually was to become his wife, he found Jesus Christ. Before that he says Billboard was his Bible, record charts his God, and prestigious positions his purpose. He described the Holy Grail as a Grammy!

But the change was dramatic. He had overseen the careers of the Beach Boys, Glen Campbell and many others. He had everything … servants, gardeners, housekeepers, fame and glory in LA.

Today his life is very different and all because the One who changes lives, whether you are a Russian count or a record producer, has control of his life.

Christian Life