1. God tamed Carson’s temper.
As a child, Ben Carson had trouble controlling his temper. He recounts an occasion in which he gashed a boy across the forehead with a lock; threw a rock at another and smashed his nose; nearly took a swing at his mother; and, finally, tried to knife a friend in the belly, only to be saved by a belt buckle. Anguished, Carson locked himself in his bathroom at home for two hours, turning to God for help:
“Lord,” I whispered. You have to take this temper from me.” If you don’t, I’ll never be free from it. I’ll end up doing a lot worse things than trying to stab one of my best friends.”
Tears streamed between my fingers. “Lord, despite what all the experts tell me, You can change me. You can free me forever from this destructive personality trait. . . . You’ve promised that if we come to You and ask something in faith, that You’ll do it. I believe that you can change this in me.” I stood up, looking at the narrow window, still pleading for God’s help. . . .
And since that day, since those long hours wrestling with myself and crying to God for help, I have never had a problem with my temper. . . .
— Ben Carson, “Gifted Hands”
2. God gave Carson the questions and answers for a college chemistry test.
As a freshman at Yale, Carson fell behind in his chemistry class, and on the night before the final exam, he was poised to fail. If he did, he would drop out of the premed program, dashing his dream of becoming a doctor:
My mind reached toward God — a desperate yearning, begging, clinging to Him. “Either help me understand what kind of work I ought to do, or else perform some kind of miracle and help me pass this exam.”
From that moment on, I felt at peace. I had no answer. God didn’t break through my haze of depression and flash a picture in front of me. Yet I knew that whatever happened, everything was going to be all right.
It was nearly 10:00 p.m., and I was tired. . . . “Ben, you have to try,” I said aloud. “You have to do everything you can.”
While I slept I had a strange dream, and, when I awakened in the morning, it remained as vivid as if it had actually happened. In the dream I was sitting in the chemistry lecture hall, the only person there. The door opened, and a nebulous figure walked into the room, stopped at the board, and started working out chemistry problems. I took notes of everything he wrote.
When I awakened, I recalled most of the problems, and I hurriedly wrote them down before they faded from memory. A few of the answers actually did fade but, still remembering the problems, I looked them up in my textbook. I knew quite a bit about psychology so assumed I was still trying to work out unresolved problems during my sleep.
“God, You pulled off a miracle,” I told Him as I left the classroom. “And I make a promise to you that I’ll never put you in that situation again.”
–Ben Carson, “Gifted Hands”
3. God gives Ben Carson $10.
Carson writes that he was chronically short of cash while a student at Yale. One day during his sophomore year, he realizes he has no money at all, not even enough to take the bus back and forth to his church:
That day I walked across the campus alone, bewailing my situation, tired of never having enough money to buy the everyday things I needed, the simple things like toothpaste or stamps. “Lord,” I prayed, “please help me. At least give me bus fare to go to church.”
Although I’d been walking aimlessly, I looked up and realized I was just outside Battell Chapel on the old campus. As I approached the bike racks, I looked down. A ten-dollar bill lay crumpled on the ground three feet in front of me.
“Thank You, God,” I said as I picked it up, hardly able to believe that I had the money in my hand.
–Ben Carson, “Gifted Hands”
4. God saved Ben Carson and his future wife in a car accident.
During a late-night drive from Michigan back to Connecticut for college, Ben Carson and Candy Rustin both fell asleep. Their rental car veered off the road, heading toward a deep ravine. Carson woke up, took his foot off the gas, and tried to veer back toward the highway.
Going at that speed, the car should have flipped over, but a strange thing happened. Because of my overcorrection with the steering wheel, the car went into a crazy spin, around and around like a top. I released the wheel, my mind fully concentrating on being ready to die.
Abruptly the Pinto stopped — in the middle of the lane next to the shoulder — headed in the right direction, the engine still running. Hardly aware of what I was doing, my shaking hands slowly turned the wheel and pulled the car off onto the shoulder. A heartbeat later an eighteen-wheeler transport came barreling through on that lane.
I cut off the ignition and sat quietly, trying to breathe normally again. My heart felt as if it were racing at 200 beats a minute. “I’m alive!” I kept repeating. “Praise the Lord. I can’t believe it, but I’m alive. Thank You, God, I know You’ve saved our lives.” . . . .
Candy reached across the seat and put her hand in mine. “The Lord spared our lives. He’s got plans for us.”
“I know,” I said, feeling just as certain of that fact as she did.
–Ben Carson, “Gifted Hands”
5. God retrieves Ben Carson’s stolen passport.
Two weeks before an important trip to West Germany in 1987, in which Carson would examine two candidates for surgery, thieves broke into his home. Among the items they stole was a small safe containing his personal documents, including his passport, complicating his travel plans:
While realizing it would be difficult to replace the passport in two weeks, I didn’t know it would be impossible. When I called the state department, the kind-but-efficient voice said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Carson, but nothing can be done in such a short period.”
I then asked the police investigator. “What are the chances of getting back my papers, especially the passport?”
“No chance,” he snorted. “You don’t ever get those kinds of things back. They trash them.”
After hanging up, I prayed. “Lord, somehow You’ve got to get me a passport if you want me involved in this surgery.” I tried not to think about the passport. Because of my caseload I became so absorbed in other things, I put the matter out of my mind.
Two days later the same policeman phoned my office. “You won’t believe this, but we have your papers. And your passport.”
“Oh, I believe it,” I said.
–Ben Carson, “Gifted Hands”
6. God helps Ben Carson replace his secretary.
When he was a resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Carson was struggling with a secretary whose performance he found inadequate. He had already identified a potential replacement but first needed to dismiss the current staffer:
I had to address the problem of what to do about my current secretary, who, besides being incapable of doing the work, was an alcoholic. I had not told anyone else, but I knew that something had to change.
I walked back into my office, shut the door, and prayed quietly, Lord, how am I going to resolve this dilemma without having to hurt anyone? I want to be kind to her, but I can’t let this go on.
I did not get an instant answer, but I felt better.
Two weeks later, my then-secretary did not show up on a Monday morning. We called her apartment and got no response then or later. For days we kept trying to locate her, including checking with all the local hospitals. We never did find out what happened to her. She simply disappeared. I regret that the depth of this woman’s problems leading to her dismal situation was not more apparent to me and that I did not have more time to try to help her resolve her problems.
I am thankful that this problem was resolved without any unpleasantness on my part.
–Ben Carson, “Think Big”
7. After a hopeless case ends in recovery, Ben Carson is convinced of God’s role in his career.
A family tells Carson that they’ve been praying for God to lead them to a Christian neurosurgeon who could operate on their son Christopher. Carson tells them, as multiple other specialists had done so already, that he believes their child has an untreatable tumor, but they insist that God is going to heal him. “Your faith is admirable,” he tells them, even while worrying privately that they were fooling themselves. However, following two surgeries, the child unexpectedly begins to recover, transforming Carson’s perception of God’s involvement in his work, and the perception of a colleague, too:
Months later, one of the doctors who was working as a neuro-oncologist told me, “You may not understand what’s happened to me, Ben. You see, I’ve been an atheist for a long time. Or maybe I just did not see any need for God. But the Christopher Pylant incident has changed my thinking. The faith of those people and the results in that boy have had a profound effect on me.” His words touched me just as much as his being honest enough to admit it. “I do understand the profound effect,” I said.
–Ben Carson, “Think Big”
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