The Lutheran Hour
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"Difficult People"
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Text: Genesis 31:6-7
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It’s been said that there are three kinds of people in the world: the people who help you in difficult times, people who leave you in difficult times, and the people who put you in difficult times. Of those three groups, where do you find yourself devoting the most mental and emotional energy? For me, it’s more often that third group, the people who put you in difficult times. These people are the ones that crowd my thoughts like car accidents on the roadside. I can’t look away from them. They keep hijacking my train of thought. People who put you in difficult times, we all have them, right? Although, not to the same degree, because there’s a range of difficulty. Because not every difficult person brings the same level of pain into your life. It’s funny though, because sometimes the severity of the pain is irrelevant to how much space that person takes up in your thoughts.
For example, as a pastor, I was once visiting a married couple who was on the verge of divorce. Now can you guess what the major pain was that they were inflicting on each other at that time? It was over how the other person was loading the dishwasher. He couldn’t stand the way she did it and she couldn’t stand how insistent he was about it. Now, obviously there was a lot more going on under the surface, such as 20 years of unresolved resentment. But in that moment, it was the tiniest irritation that had become the throbbing splinter under the pinky nail of their marriage. You see, the severity of the pain isn’t always relevant to how much space a difficult person takes up in your thoughts, because even the slightest irritation can become all-consuming.
So what do you do? How do you cope? Maybe you just need to be done with them. Get away from them. Now, if you’re married to that person, I’d encourage you to slow it down. Go see a counselor; see if you can make it work. Very often, divorce doesn’t help. Sometimes it makes matters worse, which is why the Bible says that God hates divorce (see Malachi 2:16). If you’re not married to the difficult person concerned here, or if there’s serious abuse involved, maybe it is time to just be done with them. But sometimes that isn’t possible because they’re your boss or your neighbor or your sister. You’re stuck with them. So, what then? What do you do? Go for a walk? Call a friend to vent? Write down all the reasons you have to be grateful for the other people in your life? All of that could help, but I want to recommend something else—not instead of those things, but alongside them. Try listening to the book of Genesis, especially chapters 24 through 35, which is the story of a man named Jacob, a guy who, (it) turns out, had a lot of difficult people in his life.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a Christian or a religious person at all, try listening to Genesis as a story. A 3,500-year-old world-shaping, culture-creating, wisdom-bestowing, inspired literary masterpiece of a story. And don’t just read it, listen to it. Try this: on the internet in your search bar type “Genesis movie Max McLean.” Max McLean is a stage actor who memorized the book of Genesis and performed it live, and you can watch the video online. Watch it, listen to it. See how it helps you cope with the difficult people in your life. You can find Genesis with Max McLean (2020) at https://youtu.be/GhM8AW7L9Qc?si=9J_XJOPQZ2Ttyd14
The most difficult person in Jacob’s life was probably his father-in-law, a man named Laban, a Middle Eastern shepherd and a crafty old goat himself. Jacob had come to live with Laban and his family to escape some difficult times he was having at home because his brother wanted to murder him. But that’s another story. Laban lets Jacob stay with him. And Jacob falls in love with Laban’s youngest daughter, Rachel, who was beautiful, especially compared to her older sister, Leah. So, Jacob loves Rachel. Love at first sight. He asks Laban permission to marry her. Laban says yes, on the condition that Jacob stays and works for Laban for seven years.
Jacob agrees, and at the end of seven years Laban throws a party for his daughter and his new son-in-law. And maybe it was because the groom had a little too much to drink, and it was dark in the wedding tent, and the bride’s wearing a veil as they consummate the marriage. And that’s why it wasn’t until the next morning Jacob wakes up and realizes that it’s not Rachel he’s with, but Leah, her older sister. Laban tricked Jacob and used his daughters as pawns to do it and gives some lame excuse about their custom of not giving the younger daughter in marriage before the older, which would’ve been nice to know upfront! Thanks a lot, Laban!
Jacob is stuck, because in that culture there’s no going back. What’s done is done. So Laban makes Jacob another deal. You can have Rachel for your wife…in exchange for another seven years of labor. So Jacob gets to marry Rachel, too. But now he’s married to two jealous sisters who are using him in a competition with each other to see who’s loved more and who can have more children. And because they feel like they can’t have children fast enough, they get surrogates involved. Both sisters tell Jacob to sleep with their maidservants, Bilhah and Zilpah, to maximize their progeny. Jacob doesn’t protest, and at the end of 14 years, having arrived there penniless to escape being murdered by his brother, Jacob now has two wives—four, if you count the maidservants—who’ve given him 12 children, and an old goat of a father-in-law who seems to have an unlimited supply of good-sounding bad deals up his sleeve for his all too trusting son-in-law. And you thought you had it bad. So maybe Genesis could teach us a thing or two about how to deal with people who put us in difficult times.
Listen to how it goes. Picking up the account in the middle of Genesis 30:
Now, Jacob said to Laban, his father-in-law, “Send me on my way so I can go back to my homeland. Give me my wives and my children for whom I have served you, and I will be on my way. You know how much work I’ve done for you.” But Laban said to him, “If I have found favor in your eyes, please stay. I have learned from an omen, by divination, that the Lord your God has blessed me because of you. Name your wages and I will pay them. What shall I give you?”
Jacob answered, “Don’t give me anything. But if you will do this one thing for me, I’ll go on shepherding your flocks. And later today, let me go through the flocks and set aside every speckled and spotted sheep and goat and all the dark-colored lambs, the irregular ones, the less common ones, and let these be my wages. And my honesty will testify for me later when you come to check in on the wages you have paid me, any that is not speckled or spotted or dark-colored, it’ll be considered stolen.” Laban said, “Good, good. Let it be as you have said.”
That same day, Laban removed all the speckled and spotted and dark-colored ones and put them in the care of his sons. And then he put a three-day journey between him and Jacob, leaving Jacob to tend the rest of the flock, effectively reducing Jacob’s starter flock to zero. But Jacob was tenacious and employed some old-school livestock breeding tactics—and whether they were effective or just superstitious, who can say? But in the next breeding seasons, as new animals were born, more and more were speckled and spotted and dark-colored. So, over the next six years, Jacob’s flocks increased and grew stronger while Laban’s decreased and diminished. And Jacob became very prosperous, with large flocks and servants and camels and donkeys. And that’s when Jacob heard what the sons of Laban were saying of him, “Jacob has taken everything our father owned, and he has gained all his wealth from what belonged to our father.” And Jacob noticed that Laban’s attitude toward him was not what it had been. So Jacob sent word to his wives, Rachel and Leah, Laban’s daughters, and he said to them, “I can see that your father’s attitude toward me is not what it was before, but the God of my father has been with me. You both know how I served your father with all my strength, yet your father has cheated me and he’s changed my wages 10 times, but God has not allowed him to harm me. If your father said, ‘The speckled ones will be your wages,’ then all the flocks gave birth to speckled young. And if he changed it and said, ‘No, no. The streaked ones will be your wages,’ then the next breeding season, they all gave birth to streaked young. And so, God has taken away your father’s livestock and he’s given it to me. In the breeding season I once had a dream. The angel of God said to me, ‘Jacob,’ and I said, ‘Here I am.’ And he said, ‘I have seen all that Laban has been doing to you. Now arise. Leave this land and return to your homeland, to your father’s house.'”
Rachel and Leah answered and said to him, “Do we have any share in our father’s inheritance? Does he not treat us as foreigners? Not only has he sold us, but he’s used up what was paid for us. And now all the wealth God took away from our father belongs to us and to our children. So whatever God has said to you, do it.” And so they left, all of them—Jacob, his wives, their children and servants and livestock. They left in secret on the 500-mile journey back to Jacob’s home. But as they were leaving, Rachel stole her father’s household gods, the little statues Laban worshiped and kept for good luck. Now, it was during the breeding season and Laban was busy, but after three days, word got to Laban that Jacob had fled.
So Laban took his kinsmen, his relatives, with him. They mounted up and pursued them for seven days and caught up with them. But that night God came to Laban in a dream and said to him, “Be careful not to say anything from good to bad to Jacob.” Which probably meant something like, “Listen here, don’t you go making any more good-sounding bad deals with Jacob.” So the next day when Laban overtook Jacob, he said to him, “What have you done? You’ve deceived me. You’ve carried off my daughters like captives in war. Why didn’t you tell me, so I could send you away with joy and singing and music? You didn’t even let me kiss my grandchildren and daughters goodbye. You have done a foolish thing, and I have the power to harm you. But last night the God of your father spoke to me saying, ‘Be careful not to say anything from good to bad to Jacob.’ But tell me, why did you steal my household gods?”
Jacob answered, “Look, I was afraid because I thought you would take your daughters away from me by force. But your gods? If you find anyone here who has your gods, he will not live. See for yourself whether there is anything of yours here with me. And if so, take it.” Now, Jacob did not know that Rachel had stolen them. So, Laban searched. He searched the whole camp, every tent, and finally, he came to Rachel’s tent. Now, Rachel had taken the household gods and she had put them in her camel’s saddle and sat on them. And Rachel said to her father, “Don’t be angry, my Lord, that I cannot stand in your presence, for the way of women is upon me. I’m having my period.” So Laban searched, but he did not find his household gods.
Now Jacob was angry. He said to Laban, “What sin have I committed that you hunt me down? I’ve been with you now for 20 years, and this is how it’s been for me. Caring for your flocks, the heat consumed me by day, the cold by night. Sleep fled from my eyes. It was like this for 20 years. I served you 14 years for your daughters, 6 years for your flocks, and you’ve changed my wages 10 times. And if the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the fear of Isaac had not been with me, you would’ve sent me away empty-handed. But God has seen my hardship and my toil, and last night He rebuked you.”
And Laban answered Jacob, “The women, your wives, are my daughters. These children are my children. These flocks are my flocks. All you see is mine. Yet what can I do?” So Laban made a covenant with Jacob, a solemn promise that they would go their separate ways and would do no harm to each other. Laban said, “God Himself will be witness between us. God will judge between us.” And they ate a meal together. And early the next morning, Laban got up, kissed his grandchildren and his daughters and blessed them, and then he left and returned home.
Those are excerpts from Genesis 30 and 31.
How do you deal with people who put you in difficult times? One option is to be done with them, but that’s not always possible. Jacob was ready to be done with Laban after 14 years, but God wasn’t done with the two of them yet. And maybe there’s a reason that God has let that difficult person into your life, and if you can’t be done with him, how do you deal with them? You could just roll with it. That’s what Jacob did for a time. The Bible narrates seven years of a difficult situation for Jacob, and he barely says a word. He mostly just keeps his mouth shut and rolls with the punches. His father-in-law using him, his wives using him, everybody walking all over him. And the only thing we hear from Jacob over these seven years is a rhetorical question: “Am I in the place of God?” No. And so dealing with people who put us in difficult situations, sometimes the best thing is just to keep quiet and roll with it.
But that’s not all. Because the God of Jacob, the Creator, is working through it. In Genesis, we see God working like an author of a literary masterpiece. In the background He’s writing the story in His own hand. Writing it in ink. And ink? That’s nasty stuff, isn’t it? It’d make you sick if you swallowed it. Have you ever had an ink pen blow up in your pocket? It gets everywhere. It stains. You can’t get it out. Ink is ugly stuff. But a skilled writer can employ it for good. The evil things that people do, the hate they give, the pain we needlessly suffer and dish out to each other—it’s a mess. It isn’t right. It’s not what God wants for us, but God uses it. The blow-ups and blots and stains—He’s using all of it to write the story that’s shaping us into the people He created us to be, because He loves us.
And if God can make something of the Rorschach blot that is Jacob’s family, if God can use that mess to bring about the greatest good, the birth of the promised Messiah, Jesus, to bless the nations—if God can work through the most difficult time, through the brutal death of His Son, the crucifixion of Jesus, to bring about the highest good, the forgiveness of our sins, the removal of our stains and the birth of a new creation and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, then nothing is impossible for God. Not even that difficult person in your life.
Maybe God is using that person like a mirror. Laban was like a mirror for Jacob. All the trickery and deception and manipulation, that’s exactly what Jacob was doing to his brother, Esau. It’s why Esau wanted to murder Jacob. It seems that Jacob needed a Laban in his life. Because of Laban, Jacob started seeing things from outside of himself. He started seeing how he had brought pain into the lives of other people, and he started to feel some empathy because now he knew what it was like to put up with such a piece of work. God may be using that person for you like a mirror and also like a mallet. The prophet Jeremiah says God’s Word is like a hammer that breaks rocks to pieces (see Jeremiah 23:29), and that God can use even an evil person like a hammer to break our pride to pieces (see Jeremiah 51:20).
Now, we are not saying this excuses any sin. It doesn’t. We’re only saying that evil cannot negate God’s good purpose. God can use a difficult person to wear us down, to knock off our sharp edges. Jacob became a different person after 20 years with Laban: more humble, more grateful, more eager to answer God’s call on his life. God is the author of Jacob’s life story, and he’s writing yours, too. It may be time to be done with that person who’s put you in this difficult time, to stand up to them, to walk away from them. God had Jacob leave, eventually. Or it may just be time to roll with it. God kept Jacob there 20 years, remember? Whatever time it is, expect God to be writing the story through it. That person may be a mirror for you or a mallet. But also know that they are a main character in the story God is writing for them, because God loves them, too. And you get to be a minor character in their story because you are someone God is using to reveal to them their vices and to refine their virtues. Like how God used the tenacious daughters and son-in-law of Laban to strip him of his idols, to take away his power and his pride, to bring him closer to the one true God. Remember that you may be the difficult person in someone else’s story. Now that’s not an excuse to be a jerk, but the fact that they put up with you at all, that’s something for which you can be grateful. Maybe you should write that down somewhere or give them a call. Tell them how grateful you are that God has put you two together. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.