Some people are hard. You know how you know? When you’re around them, you have some kind of physical reaction – an uneasy tummy, your heart rate goes up, you feel yourself having to take a deep breath, your eyes squint.

Hard people stir your emotions.  Observe your feels next time you’re around someone hard.  You immediately feel defensive.  Your guard goes up, and you feel the need to protect yourself.  You are saddened, disappointed, or instantly regretful about engaging.  Anger and resentment bubble right to the surface.  You’re annoyed.

The hardest people challenge your heart. Contradicting them could start World War III. If you go along to get along, you feel you’re betraying yourself.

While banishing hard people from the planet seems like a good solution, that’s not a thing. Not only can we not ship hard people off to a colony on Mars, we are often tied to them through family, marriage, work, and school. Some hard people can’t be avoided.

If I haven’t healed from the unfortunate event, the unkind words, the trauma, the abuse, the whatever inflicted by that person, then they live in my head rent-free. Everything they do or say hits a nerve. Every time the phone rings, I dread picking up. Whenever they talk, I want to scratch my eyes out…or theirs! I brood, and I stew. I come up with plan to march over there and do something that sets everything straight once and for all.

It doesn’t work like that, though. None of it works like that. When it comes to dealing with hard people, the only person I can control is Myownself, and Sister sometimes has no filter and flimsy self control.  So what do we do?

We can meditate. Meditation and prayer bring my attention and focus to a single moment in time where I am safe, comfortable, and free. My mind can wander or not. I can allow my brain to dredge up memories and my heart to flood with emotions, then right there, I can observe them, feel them, and send them up to God for recycling.

We can jump ship. Yes, Lord, leave ’em. Stop showing up and letting them show out. Put that “if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound” principle to work. Let it fall. I promise you won’t hear it anymore if you’re not there. They’ll be fine.

We can have grace. This is the hard one. We typically reserve grace for our kids when they break a dish, for a struggling student who comes into our classroom late, for the old man at the grocery store in his Vietnam Veterans hat who is taking way too long to check out in front of us. We require some redeeming quality. The offending party needs to somehow be worthy of our grace. This is where I struggle.

And, Y’all, I think THAT makes me a hard person…and I don’t want to be one.

Hard people harbor resentment. They have unrealistic expectations. They are demanding and unrelenting. They assume and surmise, nag and badger. They talk in circles and say too much. They rehash the old and fear the new. They withhold and withdraw. All that is exactly what I do when I don’t offer grace. Exactly.

So I’ll be thankful today for hard people. Maybe rather than let them get to me, I’ll try to look at them as pesky, little pop quizzes that evaluate my grace output. Uugghh…will I be ready?

This might be my season of grace. The Universe has certainly put hard people in my path, but at the same time, it has offered me tremendous growth opportunities. I have spent so much time and effort identifying my traumas and triggers, if you’re into psych buzz words. I have confronted my issues, clarified my emotions, and prioritized my healing.

Grace, though…when I can freely offer it without judgement or expectation, when can I dole it out without even thinking, when I can catch myself unbothered, that’s when I will know I have transcended to the next level of consciousness and peace. That’s really where I want to be.

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