Ben Carson lunged forward with a camping knife. After an argument, the 14-year-old was going to kill his friend Bob.

Ben aimed his knife at the other boy’s abdomen – and missed by an inch. The knife struck Bob’s heavy belt buckle with such force that the blade snapped.  “I’ve almost killed Bob,” he thought. “I almost killed one of my best friends.”

Tears rolled down his cheeks. For the first time, he realized that rage had taken control of his life. Once he’d even struck his mother with a hammer because she wouldn’t let him wear what he wanted.

“What have I done?” he asked himself. “My temper is ruining my life.”

That was 1965. Today, anger isn’t a word people associate with Dr. Benjamin Carson. In fact, his friends call him Gentle Ben. As one of the world’s most respected neurosurgeons, he performs 500 operations a year — some of them quite complex. Hemispherectomies, for example, involve the removal of half a patient’s brain, with the remaining half functioning like the whole.

Making the Grade

But it was Ben’s own heart, not his brain, which once needed attention. “I felt I had a lot of rights,” he says, “and that meant I had to fight for them or take away other people’s rights.”

In 1959, when Ben was only 8, his father left home. Sonya, his mother, had to raise two sons in Detroit’s inner city. She was a domestic worker with a third grade education — and Ben’s prospects weren’t much better in every subject. Classmates ridiculed him as “stupid,” and his teachers did nothing to stop them.

“Only God can deliver anyone from such anger,” he says. “And I know God delivered me.”

So Sonya put her sons on a radical reading program. “The doors of the world are open to people who can read,” she told them. “My boys are going to be successful in life, because they’re going to be the best readers in the school.”

Every week, Ben and his brother Curtis went to the library, checked out two books, read them and wrote a report for their mother — unaware that she, herself, couldn’t read the books.

Then came a miracle. Ben’s reading was making a difference. By seventh grade, he zoomed to the top of his class. Yet as his grades spiralled, so did his anger. Ben had become a Christian at the age of 8, but he’d never dealt with the rage inside.

From Healed to Healer

The day he attacked Bob, he finally realized he was capable of killing not only friends but dreams — including his ambition to become a doctor. Only then did he confront the violence within. The enormity of his anger filled him with shame and self-loathing. Ben ran all four blocks to his house and locked himself inside the bathroom for more than two hours. As he wept, he opened his mother’s Bible and began to read through Proverbs. One verse seemed to cry out to him: “Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city” (Proverbs 16:32).

He read the verse several times. The tears stopped and a feeling of lightness came over him. He was free. “My temper will never control me again,” he said.

Indeed, God had changed his heart and mind. In time, he found himself on the staff at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The man who was healed now applies the gift to others. Gentle Ben has come a long way since the day he tried to kill his friend.

“Only God can deliver anyone from such anger,” he says. “And I know God delivered me.”

Cecil Murphey is a full-time author living in Tucker, GA. Used by permission.   Content distributed by HisChurchatWork.org > used for non-profit teaching purposes only.

• More from His Church at Work