I still remember the first time I met John Watson – a software whiz and entrepreneur who had worked as an aerospace engineer with the United States Air Force, building B1 and B2 bombers. By all reckoning, he was an unorthodox sort of guy. He wanted to understand the psychological compulsions that converted apathetic, uninterested people into loyal, passionate customers. And I wanted to understand him.
Seated across from me at a great table with his arms folded in a defensive pose that is so typically John, he was revealing very little about who he was. What he did let on, however, showed me a man whose potential was being snuffed out by emotional baggage he did not even know he carried. And I wanted to help him.
I invited him home, and he came two days later. We went down to my basement and for the next six hours straight, we just talked.
Once again his arms were folded, and I knew he is not even listening to me. His wall of defense was so strong that only stuff he believed of himself was being allowed to come out. But these fragments of embellished truths and half-truths hid a world of hurting and scarring that life – and people – had inflicted on him.
I believed that by investing my time in him, and guiding him out of the spiritual detritus he was caught up in, I’d be able to release the true John Watson – a decent, honest human being who had let himself be taken advantage of just too many times.
It is 6 years since my journey in a mentorship role began with John. And the first year – the first step – was absolutely the hardest. There were many layers of emotional scarring that needed to be uncovered, confronted and healed.
John’s father had been pretty unavailable emotionally during his growing up years. His peremptory, dismissive attitude towards John hasn’t changed all that much in the passing years, but childhood is a delicate time when young minds interpret the action of others as somehow their own fault. In his father’s general lack of involvement in his life, John understood there were fallacies in his own character that provoked such a behavior.
As he grew up, his self-image was damaged even further by friends who took advantage of his loving nature and let him down repeatedly. Business partners and colleagues who cheated him. Too many reasons, in other words, for John Watson to become the scarred and defeated man I had found six years ago – hiding behind a make-believe construct of who he really was because the truth was so painful.
That first year, he really fought me. He gave me embellished version of events because he probably feared judgement. He hid his actions from me because, above all else, he feared confrontation.
John was so tightly wound up, I understood the enormity of the undertaking I had committed myself to. Each strand that tied up his broken sense of self together had to be untangled laboriously, and untangled in a way that did not spook him off the path of self-realization that God had put him on. I knew that all my hard work with him could come to nothing if he suddenly decided to break off our relationship one day and choose not to walk this path with me.
But I had been called to this. Jesus had put me in John’s life for a reason, and I wasn’t about to shy away from the task, whatever the cost might be to me.
So I persevered.
I would spend 20 hours or more with him every week. I would call him out on his untruths and force him to look his problems in the face. He did so on most occasions. He came through. When he didn’t, our face-off sometimes escalated to a climax – where I was confronting him with the hardest-hitting facts – but we always came down from the edge being closer and more devoted to each other than ever.
Confrontation isn’t always a bad thing, you see. When something is wrong with a car, for example, you have to open up the hood and reveal the problem hidden underneath it, before you can repair the broken parts and make the vehicle run again. I believed John was truly committed to making positive changes in his life and I was committed to helping him.
At heart, John is and always was a caretaker. His loving nature means he wants to take care of everybody. He raised two daughters who weren’t his own with more love than a biological father would have probably given them. He opened his home up to his brother-in-law. He took care of his mother-in-law until she died of cancer and let his own parents live with him as well. He loved his wife with a deep devotion.
John Watson never failed to show up for anybody. But others – as is often the experience of truly good-hearted people – did not show up for him.
Re-building self-esteem was an enormous part of the mentorship work I had to do with John. That, and being kind. The man hadn’t known much kindness in his life.
We created a business together and I took John and another partner on board. But soon, the third member of this partnership turned on John and wanted him out of the business. I fought tooth and nail to protect John because my purpose in this was much greater than the business itself. I couldn’t be a facilitator in another setback in John’s life that would undo all the good work I had already done to make him believe in his worthiness. No way. Not ever.
Each time I fought to stand by John, I think he learnt to trust me a little more. We started leveling the balance of our relationship, and build the strongest bond of friendship. Today, John is as protective of me as I am of him. He advises me on things going on in my life and stands in support whenever I need it most. Without question, he is my best friend, my brother, and the most important person in my life, other than my family.
When I look back, I see us as two travelers who met accidently on a steep and dangerous hiking trail. With his life on the line, John wasn’t 100 per cent sure certain that I would risk my neck to save him if he slipped and went over the edge. Or maybe, I’d think he’s slowing me down, and desert him to get back to safety quickly on my own.
But once the bond of total trust was forged, and survival meant being together and staying together, he no longer got scared or uncertain if I stepped off the trail for a minute. He knew I would be back, and we would resume our journey, because our path is joined forever and our destination is a common one.
My own guiding light and unwavering belief in this process comes from the example set by Jesus himself when he mentored his flock. He did not talk down to them and try to change their mistakes by the sheer force of his greater willpower. Instead, he extended a loving hand of friendship. He poured so much unconditional love into the mentorship process that healing came as an inevitable consequence of the interaction. This has been my experience with John. And walking the path of partnership with him, I find I am learning and growing as a person in ways I probably would not have if this higher purpose was not such a defining force in my own life.
