God's Healing Love Is Real

I have a story to tell about the beauty of little prayers. One that happened to me as a kid when I played Little League for the Hilton Hornets - a little prayer that took 20 years for an answer.

Our neighbor, Dr. O'Connell, asked me to water his rose garden every day for three weeks that summer while he was away. His rose garden was famous in northern New Mexico. And the cash sounded good. I pictured several movies with buttered popcorn.  

We walked into his rose garden where I saw another world. Red. Orange. Yellow. Wow. A maze of trails among tiers of railroad ties. A jungle of roses, I thought. I pulled down the bill of my Little League cap to cut the sun's glare.

"Remember to fill each rose trough until it's about half full. The sun gets scorching this time of year," he told me. I fidgeted. I didn't like conversation with adults. I wanted to go break in my new baseball glove.

I watered the plants every other day for the first week, reading the labels attached to each stem through the hour ordeal. Double Delight. Queen Elizabeth. Sutter's Gold. 

The second week boredom set in. On Monday I skimped a little on each flower, and thought about the batters I'd be facing that afternoon. A day or so later, we played the Rotary Dukes. It dawned on me I'd missed watering for a couple of days. I shrugged off the worry. How thirsty could they be anyhow? 

On Monday of the third week the flowers looked sort of weak. Petals floated up on the water as I hosed each trough. I gave them an extra amount to help them out. The week passed quickly. I hurled a one-hitter, then hit a triple against the Ready Kilowatts. I forgot the roses entirely.

The following Monday I remembered Dr. O'Connell and his jungle of roses. How many days had the roses gone without water? I felt too frightened to go and check. Fingers of shame squeezed my stomach like a vice. In practice I hit two batters with wild pitches. 

   

I ached with anxiety as I rode my bike home. Mom met me on the porch. She looked awful. "Dr. O'Connell came home today," she said. "All of his roses are dead." 

I wanted to disappear from Earth and never be heard from again. She shook her head and whispered, "He was crying."   

No punishment could have been worse than those words. That night a hideous feeling squirmed in my belly, my heart bursting with remorse. Before going to sleep, I prayed to God that I might someday make amends to Dr. O'Connell, but I knew that nothing could replace the rose garden, now a rose cemetery.  

I avoided Dr. O'Connell for the next 20 years. Oh, I thought about him all right, when I saw him out walking or driving his car. But I made sure he never saw me.  

Meanwhile, I was making progress in developing more of a balanced personality.  I became a doctor of psychology and published the first version of what is now The Self Compass: Charting Your Personality in Christ.

Back in my home town one Christmas, I was out for breakfast when Mary, Dr. O'Connell's daughter, came up to my table.  She asked to join me and we chatted. Then she asked, "Did you know that Dad passed away last month?"

"I'm sorry, Mary," I said, the old guilt flip-flopping in my belly.

"It's okay. He died very peacefully -- thanks to you."

I leaned forward, unsure I'd heard her right. But Mary told me that her father, a lifelong atheist, had come across my book about how Christ works in people's personality. How he read it during the last three days of his life. And how he changed. His last day, he led the family in their first prayer over dinner. And when he died, my book was resting in his lap. 

Tears flooded my vision. Mary gave me a hug: "And Dan, his last journal entry said, 'I know Christ's love is real.'"

At that moment, 20 years of guilt and shame melted away. I'd been unable to do it on my own, but with God's help, I had at last made amends to Dr. O'Connell.

How The Self Compass Works

The Self Compass is a scientifically validated model of personality as well as descriptive of Christ’s behavior as presented in the Gospels. Its great strength is that it helps you assess your own and your partner's ability  to communicate with deepening intimacy.

The complimentary polarities of Love and Assertion, and Weakness and Strength are the LAWS of personality and relationships. Like Christ, healthy people express both tender care and diplomatic assertion. They are competent and strong, yet humbly aware of their weakness. They achieve this balance by maintaining rhythmic access to all four compass points of the Self Compass. By enlisting these compass points in rhythmic dialogue, people find the hidden originality of their selfhood that yields a dynamic, flexible personality.  How does the Self Compass help you develop a richly satisfying love relationship?  It starts by assessing yourself. Take the Love compass point, for instance. Are you loving, but perhaps too loving?  Are you too dependent, too clinging, too needing other people's approval and fearful of their anger to the point that you don't stand up for yourself?  Can you see how this pattern of being stuck on the Love compass point can lead to a devitalized relationship? After all, it's hard to relate to a marshmallow.  What's the answer? Take a trip over to the Assertion compass point and gather up some courage to express a point of view, address unfairness, yet making sure to keep the Love compass point operative with kindness and good cheer. It's the same with the other compass points.  Are you confident, but perhaps too confident?  Do you feel entitled?  Are you overly judgmental and negative?  If you are, you may be stuck on the Strength compass point, which can kill the joy in a relationship. Time for a trip to the Weakness compass point, where you admit that you're not perfect, that you need help sometimes, that you can let someone else in. I hope you are beginning to see how the Self Compass works. We'll be getting into more details in upcoming posts, but in the meantime, for more on how to assess yourself on the Self Compass, and what to do about it, see The Self Compass: Charting Your Personality in Christ.