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The following article first published in the New York Times, expresses a common human reality. Although the writer uses the rather harsh word, “Jerks” in her description, everyone knows someone who requires an extra measure of grace. There is a fine line between extending grace to “difficult people”, and indulging inappropriate behavior that undermines the health of a faithful convenant community. May God give us the grace to walk the line to extend grace, but also to model and reinforce behavior that empowers us all.

Help, I’m Surrounded by Jerks
From The New York Times
January 18, 2007
By Stephanie Rosenbloom

CERTAIN mortals have the power to sink hearts and sour moods with lightning speed. The hysterical colleague. The meddlesome neighbor. The crazy in-law. The explosive boss. A mélange of cantankerous individuals, they are united by a single achievement: They make life miserable.

You call them jerks, dolts and nitwits. Psychologists call them “difficult people.” In fact they are diffi cult in so many ways that they have been classifi ed into species like the Complainer, the Whiner and the Sniper, to name but three.

But in an age when no problem goes unacknowledged or unaddressed, living with such people is no longer the only choice. Instead, an industry of books and seminars has sprung up, not to help the difficult change their maddening ways, but to help the rest of us cope with them.

Whatever the reason, “difficult people” gurus are in demand. That is perhaps because everyone knows at least one person who can set the blood boiling. They can be found in corporate offices, on co-op boards, in church choirs and on university faculties. They are the office Cassandra who predicts doom for every project her team initiates, the intimidating boss for whom nothing is ever good enough and the unreasonable receptionist at the motor vehicles office.

For Ann Rothman, a Manhattan real estate agent, her diffi cult person is a know-it-all friend who simply cannot be pleased.

“She’s a superior human being, and she comes from a superior area — Berkeley, Calif.,” Ms. Rothman said. “She has told me many times that there are only two places to get good food. One of them is Berkeley, and one of them is France. And France is only second to Berkeley.”

Difficult people are not harmless. The impact of slowing productivity or creating unhappy customers and vendors is immeasurable, unknowable and often a company’s biggest cost, said Ms. Harrison of CareerTrack, paraphrasing W. Edwards Deming, a management consultant.

Yet, some scholars say, the problem is not the difficult people themselves. It is you.

“There’s a good quote from the Talmud,” said Bruce Elvin, an associate dean and the director of the Career and Professional Development Center at Duke Law School. “ ‘We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.’ That really in my view sums this topic up.”

In the end, the specialists say, we cannot control other people, only our response to them.