You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender. This week, Dan

begins a series on the subject of dealing with difficult people. He first outlines four

major categories of difficult people in our lives. He then reviews context in which we will need to deal

with such people and suggest that we should reach for a better goal than simply boiling over

in confrontation or escaping a difficult person altogether. Unless you live on a desert island,

I can almost assure you that you have had to deal with difficult people.

And difficult people, well, let's just say it even more pointedly, if you're living alone on a desert island, you probably have to chronically deal with a difficult person yourself.

But the reality of living in a world where there are

a wide variety not only of people, but a wide variety of difficult people, it is inevitable

that we're going to have to develop the skill mentality and frankly the theology of how to deal with people

who are at some level perplexing at best and at times really debilitating. They can undermine a sense

of goodness of life, the ability to be able to live well in a neighborhood, be part of a

community of any sort, a difficult person can ruin great elements of our life. And frankly,

in the intersection with a difficult person, it exposes without question our own frailties.

It just creates for us this struggle with frustration and exposes our own failure.

So between the frustrations to the foolishness that we feel,

we're really put in a position that it requires immense wisdom

to be able to address and deal with difficult people.

So we'll be looking, particularly at Proverbs, and how wisdom literature

gives us a entry into the process of engaging well, those who seem to provoke us, trigger us, and create at times a lot of danger.

So first, I want to talk about four kinds of difficult people that may be part of your

world.

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