You can pick your friends but not your relatives // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 3

No doubt you’ve heard the saying – you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives.  So – what do you do, when the people you’re closest to turn out to be amongst the most difficult to deal with?

 

We’re All Different

The first thing we notice when we look around at other people is that we are all different, aren‘t we? In a room of just ten people, even if two people are identical twins, we look around and we are all different. Even identical twins grow up emotionally quite different and they have different finger prints. So those differences are wonderful. That means you can do things that I can’t do and I can do things that you can’t do.

But sometimes those differences can really grate on us. You know, Jacqui, my wife, and I are really quite different. We can be lying in bed at night and I’ve got the ceiling fan on and she’s got her electric blanket on. And when we get close to people, those differences, well, you know, they can grate a little bit if we allow them to.

My strengths have a flip side to the coin, they have weaknesses underneath, and your strengths - the things that you are particularly good at, well, there’s a flip side to those. The under side of those can sometimes rub other people the wrong way. We all are a bundle (as I like to say) of strengths and weaknesses. Our own blubbering mass, if you like, of really good things we can do and the things where we aren’t so strong, where maybe we fall short. And in the daily grind, in the pressures and the conflict, those different personality types are hard to deal with.

The psychologists say there are kind of four personality types - the sanguine, the bubbly, fun loving type - the choleric, the organised, decision maker - the melancholic, the temperamental, creative - and the phlegmatic, the peace loving, kind of ‘hippy’ - and you and I, we’re all kind of a blend of one or two of those, I guess.

That’s ok, because people that are at a distance, that’s not so hard to deal with, but let’s look across our families at the moment - our immediate families and our extended families and what we know is, those differences in a family situation - in our homes, in the places we go to rest and relax and recuperate and be recharged - in those places, those differences can be painful and annoying. You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your relatives.|

Even husband and wife, as they get to know each other - I mean, of course, we can pick our husbands and wives but once we get to know each others weaknesses, once the relationship develops and the marriage goes on for a few years, it’s easy to get to the point and say, “oh, why did I pick her, or why did I pick him?” Is anyone compatible really? We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We all know we’ve got mistakes, we all know we’ve got rough under-bellies that, you know, don’t quite measure up.

We are in the middle of a series called, ‘Dealing with Difficult People’ and today we are going to look at dealing with the difficult people in our families - the people who are closest to us.

The Bible says we should love people, the question is: How? How do we love people? It’s not enough to know that we should love difficult people in our families but it’s important to know how to love those difficult people, because how we love them will make a huge difference to our lives and in fact, the lives of all of those people who are close to us. And I guess I talk not only about our family, but people whom we work closely with. The ones that are really close to us are the ones - well, we can hurt them the most and they can hurt us the most. The more important that person is to us, the more they can hurt us because we open ourselves up; we expose ourselves.

So I like to start reading in First Peter, which is right towards the end of the New Testament - First Peter chapter 2 beginning at verse 18, right through to chapter 3.

You, who are servants, be good servants to your masters, not just to good masters, but bad ones too. What counts, is that you put up with it for God’s sake when you are treated badly for no good reason. You know, there’s no particular virtue in accepting punishment that you well deserve but if you are treated badly for good behaviour and continue in spite of it to be a good servant, that’s what counts with God. This is the kind of life you’ve been invited to. The kind of life Jesus lived. 

He suffered everything that came His way so that you would know that it could be done and also how to do it, step by step. He never did one thing wrong, not one thing did He say that was amiss. They called Him every name in the book and He said nothing back. He suffered in silence, content to let God set things right. He used His servant body to carry our sins to the cro