A Challening Person is a lesson, not an enemy

When I write, I occasionally think of a day when I'm gone. I picture my sons rifling through old articles I've written to better understand who I was and how I thought about life. And one big thing I'd like them to know - who I became - how I came to think about life - had far more to do with how I came to navigate the challenging people in my life than it did with how I came to navigate the 'easy' ones.

There are a few lessons I've taken away from challenging people that I couldn't learn anywhere else.

One: to someone - and for many of us - to MANY someones - we are all challenging people. I went through a lot of my life believing challenging people are challenging because of who they are. Then one day I started realizing some of that challenge had to do with who I am.

Eventually, I started realizing that had A LOT to do with it.
​And because of that, who I was started to change.
And still changes.

Two: challenging people have challenging stories. I have come to realize this thing I find challenging about someone didn't just happen overnight. Someone's belief or habit or vote or church door they walk through is expressed in the right now. But there are years and often decades of experiences that contributed to that right now.

We often find challenging people challenging because they are different from us right now. Well they are different from us because they've experienced life differently than us in the past. Understanding that is often a better starting place than immediately declaring someone an enemy.

And finally: there's a fine line between finding someone to be challenging and regarding them as an enemy. But once you cross that line, once you start making enemies out of the challenging people in your life, no one becomes more challenging for you to live with than you.

I guess that's why Jesus made that line such an important one in our lives to understand. I guess that's why he made that line one of his final lessons.

When a group of Roman soldiers hung Jesus on a cross, he found them to be pretty challenging. But still, he said, Father forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing.

He was saying, they are challenging because they don't know what I know, and they don't know what I know because they haven't experienced what I've experienced.

Jesus modeled putting understanding first.

Jesus modeled a lot of lessons. Maybe he saved the most important one for last.