By Zion Jenkins –
Benny was the dumbest kid in the fifth grade. Desperate, his mother prayed, and God told her to permanently shut off the TV. She made him read books instead. Benny was mad at mom, but eventually he started liking books. After reading about rocks, he became kind of a mini expert.
One day the teacher brought in a large chunk of obsidian into class and asked if anyone knew what it was. Accustomed to being the dumbest in the class, Benny didn’t answer. But after nobody else spoke up, he finally raised his hand.
“That’s obsidian,” he said. “It’s formed when molten lava runs into water and cools rapidly.”
The kids didn’t know if to snigger or be astonished. “That’s correct, Benny,” the teacher said, not completely able to hide her surprise.
That was the day that Benny launched onto the journey of becoming Dr. Ben Carson, a renowned U.S. surgeon who was the first to separate congenital twins joined in the head. Dr Carson also was the first to successfully operate a baby inside the womb.
Ben Carson was raised by a Christian mom in Detroit Michigan. His father was a pastor but also abused alcohol and had a second wife and second family. When his mom found out, she divorced him. Benny then was condemned to a life of poverty.
The TV numbed him. It also dumbed him – until Mom took the TV away. By reading books, Benny discovered he was smart.
“From that point forward,“ he said on the Shawn Ryan Show, “you never saw me without a book.”
His rise wasn’t exactly a blastoff straight to success. There were lots of bumps in the road.
One of those bumps was at age 14, when Benny confronted his temper. Some kid got him mad, and Benny shoved a camping knife into his abdomen. Luckily, it was deflected by the kid’s belt buckle.
Sobered by the fact that he could have wound up in jail as a murderer, Benny locked himself in his bathroom and asked God to help him overcome the anger. He stayed in there for three hours. He read the Book of Proverbs, which afforded him both advice and warnings for anger.
Just like his mother, Benny relied on God. When he emerged from that bathroom, he had the tools to dominate, and not be dominated, by anger flareups.
After finishing high school, Benny only had enough money to apply to one college. He applied to Yale.
Luckily, he got it in.
In his first semester, Ben was failing chemistry, a class he couldn’t fail if he wanted to be a doctor.
Once again, he turned to God and prayed. That night as he slept, he dreamed of chemistry professor doing chemistry problems on the board. On the final exam the next day, every question from his dream was the exact same one on the test. He aced the exam.
After graduating from Yale, Ben went to John Hopkins Medical School where he studied neurosurgery.
He stood out. He performed the first successful separation of congenital twins joined in the head in 1987. Their shared brain was the tricky part of the separation. After conserving the life of both twins, Dr. Carson achieved a notoriety for life. (Later, both of those twins still had brain damage; subsequent use of his pioneering surgery refined it with better success.)
He retired from medicine in 2013. In 2016, he ran for the Republican nomination for president but dropped out after Super Tuesday. Trump won the nomination and the election. Trump named Carson his secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
With his wife, Lacena “Candy” Rustin whom he married in 1975, Carson has three sons and several grandchildren. They have lived in West Friendship, Maryland, since 1988.
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