No one warns you that the deeper you go into the spiritual life, the more uncomfortable you’ll feel with your own expectations of others.
It’s easy to begin this path imagining that, in time, everyone around you will also grow. That grace will smooth out the rough edges—not just in yourself, but in those closest to you. That patience and understanding will blossom naturally. That your gentleness will be mirrored back to you.
Then life happens. People don’t change at your pace. They continue to irritate, to miss the point, to press your buttons. And you find yourself thinking, “Surely by now, they should know better.” Or worse, “I should be past being bothered by this.”
But the truth is: spiritual maturity doesn’t protect you from frustration. What it does—when it’s real—is ask you to meet frustration differently.
The Work of Bearing with One Another
One of the most overlooked spiritual practices is this: learning to bear with others.
Not “tolerate.” Not “put up with.” But genuinely, humbly, bear with.
That’s different. Bearing with someone means walking alongside them, even when their patterns rub against yours. It means seeing their imperfections not as threats or failures, but as part of their humanity—and part of your opportunity to grow.
Of course, it’s hard. Much harder than silence, or passive-aggression, or cutting someone off and calling it “boundaries.” There’s a time for boundaries, yes. But far more often, what we really need is the internal capacity to stay open.
And that only happens when we stop assuming people exist to make our lives easier.
When Correction Isn’t the Point
We love the idea of others changing. Especially when their faults inconvenience us.
We want people to be more self-aware. More disciplined. More emotionally intelligent. More spiritual. More agreeable. We want them to stop interrupting, stop making a mess of things, stop being so inconsistent, so opinionated, so slow to learn.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: it’s far easier to focus on other people’s faults than it is to admit our own.
We often believe that our frustration is about their behaviour.
But much of the time, it’s actually about our unmet expectations, our desire to feel in control, or our discomfort with unpredictability.
This is why the ancient teachers warned against the illusion of trying to perfect others. It’s not just unkind—it’s a spiritual distraction.
The Danger of Unequal Measures
There’s a strange inconsistency in how we treat faults—our own, and others’.
We want grace for ourselves, and justice for everyone else.
We understand the reasons we act out of fear, tiredness, or pride—but when others do the same, we call it character failure.
It’s easy to forget that our frustrations with others often mirror things we haven’t yet healed in ourselves.
The ego is clever. It hides behind standards and ideals. It says, “I just want them to be better,” when what it often means is, “I want them to be more like me.”
But the goal of the spiritual life isn’t to make others into our image. It’s to allow both ourselves and others to be transformed into something much larger—into love itself.
Celtic Spirituality and the Grace of Imperfection
In Celtic Christianity, the spiritual path was never seen as solitary. Even the hermits who sought solitude often returned to community—because it was in relationship that their inner work was truly tested.
They expected friction.
They expected discomfort.
They expected to be wrong about people sometimes—and to be wrong about themselves.
But they also believed that these imperfections were not obstacles to the divine—they were the very place where God could do the deepest work.
Community, with all its mess, was a sacred furnace. It burned away illusion. It refined motives. And it taught the kind of love that isn’t dependent on everything going smoothly.
A Test of Strength and Temper
It’s tempting to think that bearing with others is a sign of weakness. That being “soft” means being walked over. But bearing with someone—not enabling, not fixing, but simply walking beside—is one of the strongest things you can do.
It requires emotional discipline.
It requires self-awareness.
It requires trust that transformation is God’s work, not ours.
In times of friction, the question is not, “How do I make them change?”
It’s, “Who am I becoming as I respond to this?”
Because in the end, adversity doesn’t create our temperament—it reveals it.
Some People Will Not Change on Your Schedule
There will be people in your life who do not improve, who do not learn, who do not soften. At least, not when or how you hoped they would.
And that has to be okay.
Your job isn’t to hurry their journey or write their story. Your job is to be faithful in yours.
Sometimes, that means giving space.
Sometimes, it means offering grace again.
Sometimes, it means holding sorrow for what could have been, and letting it be what it is.
What matters is how you show up—not how they respond.
Bearing One Another Is How We Are Remade
The uncomfortable people, the irritating people, the stubborn, loud, unpredictable, defensive, overly sensitive, distant, too-needy people—these are not detours in our path.
They are the path.
Not because we’re supposed to fix them, but because in choosing to love anyway, we ourselves are softened. Humbled. Grown.
God did not design community to be convenient. He designed it to be holy.
And holiness, in this case, looks like staying. Bearing. Loving. Trusting.
Not because it’s easy—but because we are being transformed.
Feeling lost, stuck or disillusioned on your path?
Take a look at
Walking Together
Ancient Whispers 
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