Toughest People to Love Quotes

“In the upside-down economy of Jesus, those closest to the bottom are nearest to grace. Polished and put together, many of us live our lives without a real, palpable need for God. We preach grace. But we’re working really, really hard to avoid hitting bottom ourselves.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“To lead and lead well, you must necessarily come to the end of yourself (your false self!), and find that this is yet a beginning of a new life, a new kind of leadership, animated by God’s abiding Spirit in you. Living from your core, where the Spirit dwells, you can relinquish the need to fix, to control, and to conquer, and drink in God’s life, a life animated by peace, rest, wholeness, love, forgiveness, and surrender. It’s the good life.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Wholeness can also be described as soulfulness, a life that’s centered, passionately engaged, open, creative, connected, and propelled by a sense of mission. It is this kind of wholeness that leaders need to cultivate in themselves and in those under their leadership.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Bold love is courageously setting aside our personal agenda to move humbly into the world of others with their well-being in view, willing to risk further pain in our souls, in order to be an aroma of life to some and the aroma of death to others. Dan Allender”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Palmer reminds us of what happens when we don’t allow ourselves to be revealed: Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the integrity that comes from being what you are.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Jacob Neusner, writes that God’s command to rest is, in essence, an invitation to return to Eden in all its beauty, wholeness, and shalom.5 For all the Christian chatter about “keeping Sabbath,” I suspect most of us don’t know what it means at all. We may define rest as stopping, sleeping, relaxing, enjoying — and all of these are very good! But we forget that we’re literally incapable of rest if we’re divided. Our inner divisions are what keep us from rest.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“One glaring symptom of the divided heart is exhaustion. Why? It takes a lot of energy to drag that long, invisible bag behind us.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Dan Allender writes, “This is the strange paradox of leading: to the degree you attempt to hide or dissemble your weaknesses, the more you will need to control those you lead, the more insecure you will become, and the more rigidity you will impose — prompting the ultimate departure of your best people.”15 It is, indeed, a paradox, as Allender says, because most of us have heard that we should lead by exerting authority, by “never letting them see us sweat.” What we really need to do is to be human, while at the same time challenging others to become fully human themselves.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Nineteenth-century urban preacher Charles Spurgeon once said, “It is always easier for us to want to purify other people, and attempt a moral reformation among our neighbors.” But he immediately followed that observation with this: “(Yet) how much have I helped to make her what she is? If she is degenerate, how far is that degeneracy a result of my having fallen from the high standing which I ought to have occupied?”4 Spurgeon means that people are a complicated mess, and humility is our best medicine.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Visionary leadership is not reactive. It refuses to arrogantly offer the right solution or give the right answer. Rather, leading with vision requires that we relate to people. Dan Allender writes, Leadership is not about problems and decisions; it is a profoundly relational enterprise that seeks to motivate people toward a vision that will require significant change and risk on everyone’s part. Decisions are simply the doors that leaders, as well as followers, walk through to get to the land where redemption can be found.3 Leadership hinges on relationship, and that requires us to risk. And though I’m convinced that visionary, relational leadership is a bedrock Christian posture, we all have a disturbing bent toward relational immaturity. I see how easily I become cynical, dismissive, judgmental, and reactive. I see how quickly I’m tempted to blast back at the person who sends a critical e-mail, or judge the person who doesn’t make progress fast enough, or get impatient with those I manage who don’t accomplish exactly what I think they should. Our journey toward dealing compassionately with difficult people doesn’t simply require us to learn a bit more about others. It also requires us to become better acquainted with ourselves.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“Deep change comes only through real personal growth — through learning and unlearning. This is the kind of generative work that most executives are precluded from doing by the mechanical mind-set and by the cult of the hero-leader: The hero-leader is the one with “the answers.” Most of the other people in the organization can’t make deep changes, because they’re operating out of compliance, rather than out of commitment. Commitment comes about only when people determine that you are asking them to do something that they really care about. For that reason, if you create compliance-oriented change, you’ll get change — but you’ll preclude the deeper processes that lead to commitment, and you’ll prevent the emergence of self-generated change. Again, you end up creating a kind of addiction: People change as long as they’re being commanded to change — or as long as they can be forced to change. But, as a result, they become still more dependent on change that’s driven from the top.1”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself

“After they sinned, God greeted Adam and Eve in the Garden with the words “Where are you?” And the Spirit asks this same question of us, as well as the people we lead. Indeed, it takes a lifetime to answer. But God is committed to finding us, loving us, and restoring us for the sake of the beauty and blessing of his kingdom.”
― Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love: How to Understand, Lead, and Love the Difficult People in Your Life -- Including Yourself