Seeing Difficult People Through The Eyes Of God

Sometimes -- let's face it -- there are difficult people in our lives.

Sometimes they are aware of how difficult they are making our lives, and, I'm sure, sometimes they are unaware of the injury they are causing.

I believe that when difficult people are being, well, difficult, often they are in tough spots themselves. Still having that awareness doesn't make it easy to be around them.

Lately, when I've been thinking about the difficult people in my life, I've been reminded of the tremendous divine gift that was given to Thomas Merton, a not-so-simple monk who lived in the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in the mid-twentieth century.

In 1958, he was running errands in the city of Louisville when something spectacular happened. Years later, he wrote these words about that day: "In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs."

In I Corinthians 6:19, St. Paul reminds us, "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?"

What does that mean? And if we lived our lives with that awareness -- that God dwells in us --  how would we be different?

Would we see people through God's eyes? Even the difficult ones? And would we love them?

I am reading the book, "A Walk through the Dark," by Eva Piper. In it, she writes about her husband Don's recuperation from a devastating car/truck accident.

During the accident, part of his femur detached from his body and was never found. After medical teams stabilized him, she was asked to make the decision to either have that leg amputated or have it attached to an Ilizarov apparatus in the hope that his splintered bones would reconnect.

She was warned that the procedure would cause him excruciating pain every day he was undergoing it.

She consented to the procedure, and he began the process which, as the doctors had warned, caused excruciating pain. "At times, he prayed to die and begged God to take him," she writes.

She remembers that he spiraled deep down into depression, refusing to talk to her or even look at her.

"I loved him but I didn't like him very much during those times. It occurred to me that God loves us in all our ugliness. I decided to try to see Don through God's eyes."

When Thomas Merton was gifted with the ability to see people in a new, divine way that day in Louisville, he said, "It was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed."

So is that our prayer when we are dealing with difficult people -- that we see them through the eyes of God, through the eyes of love?

In difficult times, should we pray only  for strength? Or should we pray that God will gift us with the ability to see  what He sees in His people, the "secret beauty of their hearts?"