The following story is profoundly sobering. Sense the depth of this man’s sorrow, and also the exhilarating power of a single idea-that there is space between stimulus and response.
After graduating from college, I become a successful engineer. Then in my late twenties, I felt my inner voice telling me that I could teach single adults.
So I quite my career and enrolled in a seminary.
I poured myself into my studies and graduated with the highest honor the seminary faculty and administration awards each year. Just before graduation, my wife and I, together with our newborn son, Seth, moved so I could be involved with a single adults program at a large church. Again, I become successful, and enjoyed a thriving ministry that was making a difference in the lives of people.
Our family flourished in our new situation We were expecting our second child in two months. Life was good. One night, as my wife lay resting on the couch, I decided to clean my shotgun. As I was cleaning the gun, it discharged and shot my wife. The doctors were unable to save here or our unborn child.
I was devastated. It was living nightmare. My emotions alternated from denial to anguish to despair and complete emptiness. At age thirty-three, my life came to a screeching halt. I moved in with my parents for a few months after the accident. I couldn’t live alone. I continued to minister to my congregation for almost two years. Actually, they ministered to me. But I had to stop because the situation was a painful reminder of my life with Julia. You know, when you’re a religious leader, your wife and family are such an integral part of your work. I could hardly walk into the church without feeling a rush of pain and remorse. So I quit this job that had given me so much joy.
I didn’t really move on to much either. A friend of mine gave me a job selling large construction equipment. I’d never sold large equipment in my life-didn’t when know the name of some of the pieces at first. Although my job wasn’t really brain surgery, it was a godsend. All I needed to do was show up, sell some compressors of a few backhoes in the course of a month, and go home, I wasn’t intellectually stimulated, I wasn’t challenged. I couldn’t have been at the point. I was still numb. My brain and mind and heart were still trying to process what had happened. So that kind of job was just what I needed.
For a while my life was on autopilot. I woke up, fed Seth, took him to day care, when to work, picked him up, made dinner, cleaned up, and went to bed.
Before the accident, I was a very driven person. I would set goals and accomplish them. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of one thing that I wanted to accomplish after the accident. I could do all the little, everyday things that needed to be done, like shopping for milk. But I couldn’t bring myself to start doing the important things. I couldn’t, for example, start to plan a new future for Seth and myself. I just didn’t have it in me to think that far ahead or with that much interest in the future.
I started taking the book First Things First to the park and began to read just little bits at a time. When I came to the section about stimulus and response, I recognized myself. I know that I was standing at the edge of the space between stimulus and response. I’d been standing in that space for three years actually. For three years, I had slowly, inch by incremental inch, been moving toward the time that I could respond. Now, finally, three years later, I felt I could respond to my wife’s death.
This feeling wasn’t an instantaneous kind of experience. Slowly, gradually, I felt capable of more control, more initiative, more action. I can remember taking to one of my best friends, a pastor. I said, “I’m having all these weird sensations again. Something isn’t right.”
He replied, “Phil, I think what’s happening is that you’re waking up.”
“What do you mean I’m waking up?”
“Well, you’re finally ready to leave your cocoon. Your body, your mind, your heart are ready to live again. So, I think you’re waking up.”
One of the first goals I set was to finish the book. I used to be a voracious reader before my wife’s death, but I hadn’t read a book all the way through in three years. I probably hadn’t even read a magazine either. As I read I became more and more alive. I also felt more equipped to tackle the future and more ready to shape it rather than let it just happen to me.
My second goal was to leave a legacy for my son. I didn’t want my legacy to be that my life never got going again. I decided to concentrate on building something he could be proud of. You mustn’t think I was gung ho from the beginning. I slowly began to sit up and take notice. I thought long and hard about what was important to me and to Seth. I took as my motto to live each day as if it were my last, so that I would always do the important things first. I examined how I could incorporate this mind-set into my future plans. Then I formulated a mission statement that would help me recover, make a contribution to this world, and develop strong relationships with my loved ones. Slowly, surely, our lives became brighter, livelier, and livable. Ecclesiastes in the Bible talks about a time for everything. When the time was right, I was able to pick myself up and set on with life.
Today I am happily remarried. Seth loves his new mother. I have two beautiful stepdaughters. And my wheels are turning-somewhat slowly, somewhat methodically, but still turning. I began publishing a newsletter for remarried families, I’ve purchased my own business, and I’ve accepted many speaking engagements for the upcoming year.
Without a doubt, the most difficult thing I have ever done was forgive myself for the accident. The second was to live through the grieving process. The third was to have the courage to dream again and then begin the process of making those dreams come true.
Please understand, I still have what I call “my blue funks.” As John Claypool, an Episopalian minister, once said after his eight-year-old daughter died of leukemia, “I will walk again, but it will always be with a limp.” I might be limping, but I am moving along.
I would like to share a personal exhilarating moment that I recounted previously in my other books. It occurred when I was on sabbatical in Hawaii. I was wandering through some stacks of books in the back of a college library. A particular book drew my interest, and as I flipped through the pages, my eyes fell on a single paragraph that was so compelling, so memorable, so staggering that it has profoundly influenced my thinking and my life.
In that paragraph were three sentences that contained a single powerful idea:
Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
I cannot begin to describe the effect that idea had on me. I was overwhelmed by it. I reflected on it again and again. I reveled in the freedom of it. I personalized it. Between whatever happened to me and my response to it was a space. In that space was my freedom and power to choose my response. And in my response lay my growth and happiness.
The more I pondered it. I could become a force of nature in my own right.
