Difficult People

All of us have odds to overcome, but those odds are not the enemy. ... By his own admission, Elon Musk had a difficult childhood. He was bullied during high school, spending time in the hospital after getting pushed down the stairs and beaten until he blacked out. His home life wasn't much better. He described his childhood as "nonstop horrible."

One day, when he was ten years old, he saw a computer at an elec­tronics store in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was love at first sight. That Commodore VIC-20 had five kilobytes of mem­ory and came with a workbook on the BASIC programming language. That language was supposed to take six months to acquire, but Musk learned it after three sleepless nights.

Could Elon Musk have learned to code without a challenging child­hood? You bet. But he might not have pursued coding with the same kind of passion. Everything we experience is a two-sided coin. It can make us or break us, and that's up to us. You can get frustrated with the fact that you're right-handed or left-handed, or you can cultivate ambi­dexterity. You don't get to choose how your story starts, but the ending is up to you.

If you allow someone to love you, that love will take you to painful places.

Coping with difficult people is always a problem, especially if the difficult person happens to be yourself.

What problems do missionaries face? For what things do they need prayer? Cedric Johnson and David Penner surveyed 55 North American Protestant mission agencies with more than 100 staff members overseas. The missionaries listed the following problems, in rank order:

1. Relationships with other missionaries
2. Cultural adjustments
3. Managing general stress
4. Raising children
5. Marriage difficulties
6. Financial pressures
7. Loneliness

The German philosopher Schopenhauer compared the human race to a bunch of porcupines huddling together on a cold winter's night. He said, "The colder it gets outside, the more we huddle together for warmth; but the closer we get to one another, the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills. And in the lonely night of earth's winter eventually we begin to drift apart and wander out on our own and freeze to death in our loneliness."

Christ has given us an alternative: to forgive each other for the pokes we receive. That allows us to stay together and stay warm.

God put the opposites of his creation together for a reason. He knew that out of a man's and woman's differences, growth would take place. When we look at differences in this light, we feel grateful for the unique way our mates function--and we look to marriage as a place to grow.