Here is what I’ve discovered:
It’s so easy not to like someone...
The coworker who drives you bonkers.
The family member who is always causing drama.
The friend who gets mad at you over the littlest things.
The boss who makes you feel so small.
The neighbor always getting in your business.
The clingy person.
The obnoxiously loud person.
The extremely negative person.
The overly-sarcastic person.
(You get the point).
Honestly, sometimes people are just hard to love.
Sometimes when people really hurt us, or they are just too unhealthy to get close to, we need to remove them from our lives.
I’m all about setting boundaries and I don’t think we are called to keep every person in our life.
But, there are definitely times when God simply calls us to love the hard ones.
He doesn’t tell us to ignore them, He tells us to get to know them.
He doesn’t say it’s fine to talk bad about them, He tells us to speak life into them.
He doesn’t tell us to try to cut them out, but to invite them in.
Honestly? This is REALLY hard sometimes.
What I’m learning though, is Jesus can actually help us love them.
If we ask, He can give us compassion towards them instead of a hardened heart.
He can show us a little glimpse of how in-love with them He is, which helps us feel a small fraction of that love, too.
He can absolutely give us a new lens to see them through.
Yeah, it’s easy not to like people.
But it’s so much harder not to feel compassion and love towards them when we are viewing them through the eyes of Jesus....
Impossible actually.
We need to ask Jesus what He thinks about these people, and if we listen, our hearts towards them just might change.
Because you and I, we are difficult to love sometimes, too. But that’s never stopped Jesus.
Let’s be like Him.
~Kelli Bachara, The Unraveling Blog