We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. Please consider supporting this project.

Loving the Unlovable
Mother Teresa had a prayer she spoke each day that enabled her to minister effectively:
Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick, and whilst nursing them, minister unto you. Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguise of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you, and say: “Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you.”
Mother Teresa understood that when we serve others, we’re serving Jesus. The trouble is that often the people we are called to serve don’t look very much like what we might expect Jesus to look like. This prayer helped keep Mother Teresa oriented to the deeper reality that Jesus expressed when he said, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:40).
To acquire and retain the ability to see through Jesus’ “unattractive disguises” when dealing with challenging people, many find it helpful to whisper the name “Jesus” over and over. This prayer reminds them that they are serving Jesus, regardless of how the other person may be acting toward them. Many also find it helpful to whisper a prayer similar to what Mother Teresa prayed, asking God to show them a glimpse of this presence behind the disguise of a person who is irritable, exacting, or unreasonable.
Admittedly this can be very challenging, especially when we encounter difficult people who trigger feelings of disgust or hostility within, as their disguise goes beyond irritable, exacting, or unreasonable. They are cruel, vindictive, racist, violent, or self-righteous. They may be greedy, petty, or perverted. When we encounter such people, they will likely stir up strong negative emotions.
With people like this, I find it helpful to envision them as the innocent child they once were. People aren’t born cruel, vindictive, racist, violent, or self-righteous. Life in the demonically oppressed world we live in makes people this way. Not that people don’t bear some of responsibility for who they become, for amid all the things that influence us, we have an element of free will. Yet only the omniscient Creator and Judge of the earth can know the extent to which each person is responsible for their actions and the extent to which they are a victim. Our job is to leave all judgment to God (Rom 12:19-20) and to live in love (Eph 5:1-2). To relinquish all judgment and remain constant in this humble, compassionate frame of mind, I find it helpful to envision hard-to-love people as little children. Then I’m better able to see through the unattractive disguises and catch a glimpse of Jesus behind their ugly actions.
Ask God to give you eyes to see the unsurpassable worth he sees in the difficult person you’re interacting with. And remind yourself that, appearances notwithstanding, the person you’re dealing with is for you, at this moment, the single most important person in the world. Nothing matters more than reflecting God’s love to this child of God in the present moment, for the person is one for whom Jesus died.
—Adapted from Present Perfect, pages 126-129
Photo credit: Close to Home via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC
Category: General
Tags: Imagination, Love, Prayer
Related Reading

If God is already doing the most he can do, how does prayer increase his influence?
Question: If God always does the most that he can in every tragic situation, as you claim in Satan and the Problem of Evil, how can you believe that prayer increases his influence, as you also claim? It seems if you grant that prayer increases God’s influence, you have to deny God was previously doing…

Hearing and Responding to God: Part 1
A reader contacted Greg asking about making “right decisions” assuming an open future and in light of the fact that God seems to rarely speak clearly. In this first response, Greg acknowledges that even with the best of intentions, our decisions can have outcomes that are unexpected even to God! How can we move forward…

Why Your Imagination Matters
The flesh, which we discussed in this post earlier this week, is shaped by Satan’s web of deception that deeply infects our imaginations. This is why it has such power to move us to perform in order to obtain life and then to hide our failures when we fall short of true life. And of…

Put on the Armor of God
The whole of the Christian life is an act of war against the enemy as we follow Jesus in storming the gates of hell (See post.) No passage better illustrates this than Paul’s metaphor of spiritual armor from Ephesians 6. He writes that Christians are to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength…

The Cruciform Trinity
As paradoxical as it sounds, if God is supremely revealed when he stoops to the infinite extremity of becoming his own antithesis on the cross, then we must conclude that stooping to this extremity out of love must, in some sense, be intrinsic to who God eternally is. And rendering this coherent necessitates that we…

The Gift of Smallness
ram reddy via Compfight Jonathan Martin wrote this piece entitled Feeling at home in my smallness a couple of weeks ago. If you’ve been feeling like the weight of the world is on your shoulders and it’s up to you to do something amazing or if you’ve been taking yourself a little too seriously, you…