In my morning prayer of commitment one of the commitments that I make is, “today I will love any person You, Lord sovereignly bring into my life, no matter how difficult they might be to love”. In order to keep that commitment I had to define what that meant to love them, it needed to be more than a nice fuzzy feeling toward them. So I came up with 5 expressions of my love towards them. First my declaration to love the hard to love was that I would not avoid them because they were unpleasant, boring, or irritating, I would give them some time. Second, I would listen attentively as they talked and I would respond and enter into conversation with them. Third, I would honor them as a child of God and I would be nice, gracious, and kind to them. Fourth, I would not gossip or talk unkindly about them to others. And fifth, I will pray for them that God will bless them and use them for His glory. Loving people is such a key part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, but it is easy to love the nice, personable, lovable, and pleasant people, but the real test of my faith and my obedience to Jesus as my Lord is loving the hard to love. I am a long ways from perfect, but I make a daily concerted effort to love everybody that God brings into my life, especially the unlovable. But I see others who are normally good Christians, but with certain people they are rude, grouchy, impatient, and gossip about them. Granted they bring a lot of that onto themselves because of their behavior but those who love the unlovable are special favorites with God.