A lesson · Loving the Difficult Person in Your Life
Age 21+Loving the Difficult Person in Your Life
Love doesn’t require staying close, trusting again, or pretending it didn’t happen.
Assumptions & Caveats
Before you begin
What you should know
A teaching of Jesus’s is “love your enemies” — and there’s a distinction worth noticing in that. He never said there are no enemies. He said something harder and more honest: they’re real, and love them anyway. Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:35. For adults, the adversary in question is rarely dramatic — it’s usually a difficult coworker, a strained or estranged family member, or a friendship that ended badly, and the friction is often complicated by real stakes: you still have to work with this person, sit at the same holiday table, or navigate a shared history that isn’t going away. This lesson doesn’t ask anyone to resolve that history today. It asks for one narrower, more achievable thing: separating what love requires from what it doesn’t.
What we're assuming
- Almost everyone in the room has someone right now who feels like an adversary — a difficult coworker, a family member they’ve gone low-contact with, a friend a falling-out ended things with, an ex-partner. Nobody will be asked to name who.
- Adult conflict often carries real consequences attached to how it’s handled — a job, a family system, shared custody, a shared friend group — and this lesson takes that seriously rather than treating the conflict as purely emotional or abstract.
- The feeling is real and won’t be argued away, and that’s fine.
Learning goals
What they walk away with
- Knows that naming a current adversarial relationship — with a coworker, family member, or former friend — isn’t a spiritual or personal failure. It’s honesty, and adulthood doesn’t exempt anyone from having it.
- Understands the difference between pretending a hurt isn’t real (or performing “professionalism” or “being the bigger person” as a way of not feeling it) and refusing to let it decide how they act.
- Can name one concrete, felt difference between loving someone, liking them, excusing what they did, staying close to them, and trusting them again — and can apply that distinction to a real adult relationship (a coworker they still have to work with, a parent they’ve limited contact with, a friend they no longer see).
- Has practiced identifying one small, realistic response rooted in love instead of retaliation, resentment, or forced closeness — without anyone telling them they have to feel ready to forgive, reconcile, or rebuild trust that hasn’t been re-earned.
How to hold the room
Before you start talking
- This is not a lesson about forcing reconciliation, minimizing real harm, or telling anyone they owe a difficult person renewed access to their life. Be careful never to let “love your enemy” sound like “go back” or “give them another chance they haven’t earned.” Loving someone never requires staying close to them, working alongside them by choice, or extending trust that hasn’t been rebuilt.
- Real, current conflict may surface here — a hostile coworker, an estranged parent or sibling, a friendship that ended over betrayal, sometimes worse. Nobody has to name names or give more detail than they choose to.
- Adults in this room are navigating consequences younger participants aren’t: a paycheck, a family system, children who see both sides, community or church ties. Don’t rush anyone toward a tidy resolution — some of these relationships won’t resolve, and that’s allowed to be true.
- Watch the pace, same as with any age. This can tip into guilt (“a mature/spiritual adult should be past this by now”) if you rush it. Slow down, especially on beat three.
The lesson flow
Step by step
Each beat alternates a little input, a little doing, and a little reflecting. Skip, slow down, or stretch any of these to fit your group.
Naming It
Think of someone — you don’t have to say who — who currently feels like an adversary to you: a difficult coworker, an estranged or strained family member, a friendship that ended badly. Don’t judge the feeling. Just notice it’s there. Naming a hard thing honestly isn’t weakness, and it isn’t a failure of maturity or faith — it’s the starting move.
Two Things Jesus Didn’t Say
Share this out loud: the teaching is “love your enemies” — not “pretend you don’t have any,” and not “keep them in your life exactly as they’ve always been.” It doesn’t say the friction isn’t there. It says something harder: see it clearly, and respond with love anyway. Discuss: Where in your adult life have you confused “being the bigger person” with pretending something didn’t happen? What’s the actual difference between those two?
What Love Actually Requires (and Doesn’t)
This is the important one — take it slow. Sort through the difference, out loud: loving someone, liking them, excusing what they did, staying close to them, trusting them again. Love doesn’t require any of the other four. In adult terms: you can love a difficult coworker without eating lunch with them or defending their behavior to others. You can love an estranged parent without resuming unsupervised contact or pretending the history didn’t happen. You can wish a former friend well without reopening the friendship. Discuss: What would loving this person — without excusing what happened, staying close, or rebuilding trust that hasn’t been earned — actually look like, concretely, in your specific situation?
There’s a second layer worth naming directly, especially for a room doing real healing or helping work: holding someone as “the enemy” in ongoing thought isn’t only a description of the relationship — it works on the person doing the holding. Science and Health names this plainly:
“Any human error is its own enemy, and works against itself; it does nothing in the right direction and much in the wrong. If so-called mind is cherishing evil passions and malicious purposes, it is not a healer, but it engenders disease and death.”
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 400:30–15
This doesn’t loosen anything already covered — no one owes a difficult person renewed closeness, trust, or excuses. It adds a second, distinct reason for the same boundary: staying at a practical distance from someone’s harmful behavior protects you materially; refusing to let them occupy your thought as a fixed “enemy” protects you mentally, and keeps the very toxicity you’re distancing from out of your own experience rather than smuggled back in through resentment. Seeing a difficult person as whole and complete — their real identity, distinct from the behavior you’re keeping distance from — is not the same as trusting them, excusing them, or reopening the relationship. It’s a way of refusing to let their error become your ongoing company.
Discuss: 1. Is there a difference, for you, between staying safe or boundaried with someone and staying mentally “at war” with them? What would it take to do the first without the second? 2. In your own healing, helping, or professional work, have you seen someone’s fixation on an “enemy” cost them more than the original conflict did? What did that cost look like?
Practicing the Harder Thing
Without naming the person, what’s one small, realistic way you could respond to that hard relationship this week from love instead of resentment or retaliation — a boundary you hold calmly, a message you don’t send, a moment you choose not to gossip about them, one kind word without over-explaining yourself? Close with this: you don’t have to pretend it doesn’t hurt. You don’t have to like them, work to rebuild the relationship, or trust them again. You just get to choose what kind of person you are in how you respond.
What you'll need
The materials
- Paper and pens — or a shared doc / whiteboard if you’re meeting virtually
- Optional printable: Handout “Two Dials” — Love and closeness aren’t the same dial — mark where you are on each one today, for this specific relationship
If it's not going well
When this one gets heavy
“Love your enemies” can be dangerously misread as “stay, and endure it.” It never means that. If someone describes anything that sounds like ongoing abuse, a hostile or unsafe work environment, coercive control from a partner or family member, or an unsafe relationship of any kind, gently set the lesson’s discussion aside and go straight to safety — loving someone is never a reason to stay somewhere unsafe, professionally or personally. Follow the site’s mentor safety guidelines (For Mentors page) for how to respond, and be ready to point toward appropriate resources (HR, legal, domestic violence support) outside the scope of this lesson when the situation calls for it.
For the fuller tiered guidance — including what to do if someone discloses something serious — see For Mentors.
Help this get better
Teaching this to a group we haven't planned for?
Tell us — this only gets better with your eyes on it. We read every one of these.