There is an apocryphal story about Mahatma Gandhi that I love.

Gandhi was not just a political leader to the people of India, he was also a spiritual guru. People traveled from all over to ask his help with problems both small and large.

One day a peasant woman and her young son traveled a great distance to visit Gandhi. She told Gandhi that her son was addicted to sweets. The sugar made him hyper and too wild to attend school. She hoped Gandhi would tell her son to stop eating sugar. Her son admired and respected Gandhi and she was sure that her son would listen to him.

Gandhi hesitated and then told the woman to come back in one week. She was confused but agreed to come back the next week.

One week later, after hours of travel and standing in line, she and her son finally reached Gandhi. Gandhi took the little boy, sat him on his lap and said simply, “Please do not eat sugar. It is bad for you.”

The boy smiled, promised to stop and returned back to his mother. His mother was understandably stunned. She had traveled over 100 miles. It was a difficult journey. Bewildered she approached Gandhi and asked, “Why didn’t you just tell him to quit eating sugar last week when I first approached you?”

Gandhi smiled and said patiently, “Last week, I too, was still eating sugar. … We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”

The story about Gandhi maybe folklore, but the principle feels really true to me. I eat way too much sugar, both figuratively and literally.

The original draft of Dangerous Love was completed roughly five years ago. It took five years to get to you because it took another four years to get the courage to write: I too was eating sugar. Once I did, the entire book, almost every word, changed – including the title.

I never felt comfortable with the original manuscript. Every time I went to re-read it one last time before sending it to the publisher I became consumed by a nagging feeling that something was off – and never pressed send.

I had friends read it and assure me it was ready, but their assurances created more anxiety. Something wasn’t right and I spent almost two years driving myself crazy trying to figure out what it was.

Then, my world came apart several years ago: a debilitating bacterial infection in my stomach, a broken marriage that I could no longer hold together, a fragile child whom I struggled to keep alive. After years of helping others “peace” their lives back together, mine was ripping apart at every seam.

As I dove headfirst into solving, and then failing to solve, the problems that were closing in all around me, my confidence waned. Every morning I’d wake up but not want to get up. I’d look in the mirror and avert my gaze from the man who was looking back at me.

I was failing in every way someone could fail. All the years of studying peacebuilding and practicing it around the world couldn’t save me from myself. And I was ashamed.

After mediating numerous marital conflicts, I was getting a divorce. My inability to balance my life as a husband and father with that as a professor and mediator had caused major problems in my marriage. I could help everyone else in the world but struggled to help our family.

My children were suffering from my mistakes as well. Long trips away helping the people of the Middle East had taken their toll. Missed after-school activities, no time for help with homework, and a distracted, sometimes ailing dad who wasn’t as present as they needed me to be created fault lines in our relationship.

My students were impacted too. My office hours shrunk. My personal stories went silent as I was afraid my students would learn the awful truth about me: while I preached peace, I struggled (mightily) to practice it.

I was running from my mistakes, trying my best to hide my weaknesses, secretly afraid that if people really knew who I was, everything I knew and believed about peacebuilding would be instantly invalidated.

My faith in my ability to help others withered. “Why would anyone”, I asked myself daily, “ever want help from someone as messed up as me?”

One day while reading something written by the philosopher Terry Warner, I was struck by a probing personal question that ultimately led to me finishing the book.

As a young acting student studying acting with Stella Adler at her studio on Central Park West a classmate asked him a terrifying question. “Do you love yourself in the theater or the theater in yourself?” “In other words, was I in it for me or because I simply loved it?”

I began to ask myself the most fundamental question someone can ask about their vocation. Was I in doing peacebuilding for the way it made others see me, or was I in because I loved helping people?

If it was the former, then I’d never write the book. Never expose myself to more harsh judgements over my personal failings and weaknesses. They people who know me best know how much I’ve struggled, in my own life, to really live the principles in this book.

If it was the latter, I had work to do. Because this book, while filled with personal stories from my life, isn’t about me. You can think what you want about my struggles to live the way I know I should and can. But it doesn’t change the truth of what’s written here. It doesn’t change the fact that in those moments in my life when I’ve lived what I believe – I, and the rest of the world around me, were better for it.

So many things were wrong with both me and the world, and so many days those wrong things appeared to be winning.

Many of us have had days when the forces of darkness appear to be drowning out the light, weeks and months when we feel like we are clinging to a sinking ship, years when the problems we face seem insurmountable. When that happens, it’s easy to get discouraged with both ourselves and others, to tell ourselves that we or they can’t do this. So why try?

Yes, we may be stuck in debilitating patterns of inward thinking that aren’t easy to escape. We fail. I fail — all of the time. But focusing on my failures and others’ is just more smog thinking. It’s blindness to the realty that we can and do have the ability to change. Conflict can be discouraging. But it also can give us hope.

I remember these words from Desmond Tutu, as he described the horror and hope that came out of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

“I have come to realize the extraordinary capacity for evil that all of us have 
because we have now heard the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and 
there have been revelations of horrendous atrocities that people have 
committed. Any and every one of us could have perpetrated those atrocities. The people who were perpetrators of the most gruesome things didn’t have horns, didn’t have tails. They were ordinary human beings like you and me. That’s the one thing. Devastating!

But the other, more exhilarating than anything that I have ever experienced — and something I hadn’t expected — to discover that we have an extraordinary capacity for good. People who suffered untold misery, people who should have been riddled with bitterness, resentment and anger come to the Commission and exhibit an extraordinary magnanimity and nobility of spirit in their willingness to forgive, and to say, “Hah! Human beings actually are fundamentally good.” Human beings are fundamentally good. The aberration, in fact, is the evil one, for God created us ultimately for God, for goodness, for laughter, for joy, for compassion, for caring.” 1

All of us have the ability to hurt and heal, to hate and love, to take and give. Our ability to become change agents dramatically increases when we believe — deep within our bones — that we and others can change.

So, I offer you up my life, not as a model of goodness or greatness. I’ve failed and, unfortunately, may continue to fail at that standard. No, I offer you up my life as both an example of the weakness and frailty of the human spirit, and its potential to make a real change in the world.

The people I work with? The people Dangerous Love is really about? They are the heroes of this story. I wish you could meet all of them. I’m still working on giving up “sugar” in my life. The book would be better if I could give it up completely. But I don’t know how long that will take nor how long I’ll be here. Until then, I’ll humbly ask you to join me in giving up the sugar in our lives that is both sweet to the taste and bitter to the soul.

Maybe together we can change the world.

1 Academy of Achievement: Interview with Bishop Desmond Tutu. https://www.achievement.org/achiever/desmond-tutu/#interview (accessed Nov 11, 2019)