The Hard Truth About Hard-To-Deal-With Folk

I saw my college classmate, fraternity brother and good friend Bill Kelly over the weekend. In light of the fact that Hurricane Isaac has been in the news lately I was reminded that Bill once told me a cruelly funny story about his sister and brother-in-law.

It seems that his sister and brother-in-law were living in Charleston, South Carolina in 1989 as Hurricane Hugo was approaching the city. In seeking safety they made the conscious decision to leave Charleston. They traveled north out of Charleston up Interstate 26 to Columbia and ventured further north up Interstate 77 to Charlotte where they decided to check into a Holiday Inn to ride out the storm.

The storm thundered ashore and did its damage to the city of Charleston and its environs. Then the eye of the storm followed a path from Charleston up Interstate 26 to Columbia and continued north following Interstate 77 to Charlotte where it deposited a huge tree limb into the windshield of the car that belonged to Bill’s sister and brother-in-law.

In spite of their best efforts to avoid the storm and its dangerous consequences the storm did its damage.

I propose to you that hurricanes are named after people for a reason and that is that they have a lot in common. I’ve never heard of a good hurricane. Hurricanes are destructive forces of nature, which like Bill’s family discovered, sole function is bringing devastation.

Hurricanes are named after people for a reason. There are people in this world who act like hurricanes. They wreak havoc and destruction wherever they go. It seems that their purpose in life is to tear down others rather than edify them. In fact, such people often seem to destroy others instead of uplifting themselves.

Folks such as these are constantly angry and are constantly standing at center of strife and discord. Further, in spite of our best efforts to avoid them there are times that we must deal with their consequences.

It is important that we seek to deal with the negative people in our life in a positive way. I offer that dealing with negative people is not unlike dealing with a hurricane.

To deal with a hurricane one must first give up the idea of control. One cannot control a hurricane. One cannot direct its path. One cannot lessen its severity. One cannot lessen its intensity. All we can control is how we respond to the hurricane.

So it is with people. We cannot change others. We particularly cannot change strong willed people. Only God can change human beings and as I read the Bible he “stands at the door and knocks.” (Revelation 3:20) In other words we have to invite Christ into our lives in order for God to do his life changing work.

What we can control is how we respond to the negative people in our lives. What we can do is deal with the negative people in our lives out of the content of our own character rather than responding to their actions. When Jesus laid down the Golden Rule for us he said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

In other words our relationship with others is to be based on who we are, what our values are and not on how they act, what they do or what they say.

In the end we may simply have to deal with the destruction. I had visited Charleston a couple of times prior to Hugo and I returned to Charleston for the first time about four years after Hugo. To be perfectly honest, I don’t recall anything being any different from my visits prior to the storm. The folks down there rebuilt and moved forward.

In the end that is what at times we must do with the negative people in our lives. We simply must repair the damage, remembering that while we can’t control the negative people in our lives, each of us can control ourselves.