Greg's Real Love Blog

Although the youngest child of the king had never been outside the palace walls in all his eight years, early one morning he discovered a passageway that led him to the streets of the town. Overwhelmed by all the new sights and sounds, he stepped without thinking off the stone curb into the street, where he was knocked to the ground unconscious by a large two-horse cart. The driver felt nothing more than the usual rough jostling of the cobble stones, so he drove on, quite unaware of what had happened to the young prince.

When the prince awoke, he had no memory of who he was. As he sat on the curb, confused and dazed, other carts came by and splashed mud all over him. He was wet, filthy, frightened, and alone. With no idea where he was or where he was going, he began to walk through the town.

Hungry and lost, he approached a well-dressed man coming out of a shop and asked him for food. Annoyed at the intrusion of this foul-looking boy, the man sent him on his way with a kick and a curse. The prince knocked at several doors, but each time he was turned away.

Finally, he sat by the side of the road, exhausted, hungry, and still covered with mud. A farmer on his horse stopped to ask the boy why he was crying, and after hearing the prince’s story, the farmer took him home, fed him a meager meal, and gave him a place to sleep in the barn.

Of course, the farmer expected the boy to pay for everything he received, so the boy was required to work long and hard on the farm every day. His meals were scant and his living conditions the same as the hoses he tended. It was a hard life, and he was always hungry and dirty. People laughed at him and called him The Mud Boy. Sometimes they picked up handfuls of mud and threw them on him. Although it was a miserable life, the boy didn’t complain. This was the only life he could remember; it was the only home he knew. He was grateful for what he had, but he did often cast a longing eye on the food and warm house enjoyed by the farmer’s children.

All this time, the king had been looking for his son. Soldiers had scoured the countryside asking questions and putting up drawings of the boy. The farmer was actually quite certain that the boy in the barn was the prince, but he didn’t want to lose a free worker and he didn’t want the boy telling the king how he had been treated while living with the farmer. So the farmer said nothing, and no one else recognized the dirty little boy in the barn.

One summer afternoon, as the prince was unloading wood at the market in town, he noticed two older children playing. Seeing something familiar in their faces, he crossed the square to look at them more closely. They stopped their game, returned his gaze for several seconds, and ran off down the street, yelling at the top of their lungs.

Puzzled, the prince went back to his work. Minutes later, a powerful horse galloped into the market, carrying an impressive rider. He dismounted, came straight to the boy, and knelt on the ground in front of him. With tears running down his cheeks, he took water from a bucket and wiped the mud from the boy’s face.
The man asked for a mirror, and the two of them looked into it together. They had almost the same face. In that moment, the prince remembered who he was, and he knew this man was his father, the king. He remembered his brother and sister, the children playing in the square, and they all went home to celebrate their reunion.

*****

Most of us live a story like this. We’re all princes and princesses, destined to become kings and queens. But we spend our lives ignorant of our identity. From our infancy, we rely on what we are told by those around us, and nearly all of them tell us in many ways that we are inconvenient and flawed. In other words, they describe the mud on our faces, and when we are particularly “bad,” they rub even more mud on us. Because these people hold positions of such power—parents, teachers, and others—it’s only natural that we accept completely what we are told about ourselves.

Fortunately, we don’t have to stay lost and confused. We can find people who will see beneath the mud and will begin to guess who we really are. As we allow them to wash the mud from our faces, we can see who we really are, too, and in the process we become kings and queens.

As I have counseled with thousands of people, I have encountered a theme so recurrent as to be almost monotonous. Almost all of us make demands on the attention, gratitude, respect—the “love”—of particular people, and these demands uniformly lead to disappointment, anger, and frustration. I can illustrate this by presenting the case of just one man, Steve, as he talked to me about his wife, Janet.

“She always seems to be pulling away from me,” he said.

“In what ways?” I asked.

“When I want to have sex, she’s almost always resistant, sometimes a little and sometimes completely. When I’m gone from the house for several hours, I always call her to let her know where I am, and just to check in with her. But when she’s gone from the house for hours, she hardly ever calls. It’s like she’s just emotionally distant all the time, and when I talk to her about it, she just gets more distant.”

“Can you see,” I asked, “that you’re placing demands on her to fill your emptiness?”

“Yes, I can see that, but where else am I supposed to go? She’s my wife. And when I feel empty, what else am I supposed to do?”

“Sometimes just seeing that you’re making demands will help you be less demanding.”

“You’d think so, but when I get empty, I still want her to do something to make me feel better.”

“So let’s talk about the consequences of your demands. When you pressure Janet to give you sex or attention or whatever, does she like it?”

“No.”

“And then what does she do?”

“She usually pulls away even farther.”

“So the more you try to get what you want, the less you get it.”

“You’re right, but when I feel empty, I forget that, and then I push her to get what I want.”

“So instead of talking only about the negative consequences of your pressuring her, let’s look at the positive consequences of your accepting her as she is.”

I then shared with him the following metaphor.

Years ago I was on a long hike in the desert with a friend. This particular part of the desert was especially arid, so there were sand and rocks everywhere, and an occasional cactus, but the rainfall was so sparse that I didn’t see a single green leaf. After an hour of walking, though, I spotted a small yellow flower in the shade of a cactus plant. I bent down to pick it, but my friend stopped me and explained that the seeds of this plant often lay in the dry ground for years, growing only after the slightest rainfall, and if I picked this flower before it had a chance to produce seeds, I could kill off any possibility for the plant to reproduce.

Sobered by that thought, I kneeled down on the ground and admired the flower where it grew. It was beautiful, and I enjoyed it all the more knowing that my leaving it there would probably lead to the growth of more like it.

Had I picked that flower, I would have destroyed its beauty and eliminated the beauty of all its descendants.

The joy we receive from our relationships with other people can often be like the pleasure I received from that desert flower. We consistently find the greatest happiness in simply allowing people to be who and where they are—observing them and being with them. When we attempt to take what we want from them, however—when we pluck the flower from their stem, no matter how subtly we act or justified we feel—we eliminate the possibility of experiencing the full beauty we might have had, and often we kill the relationship entirely.

People are even greater miracles than flowers, because the very act of observing them and appreciating them can nourish them and empower them to grow and blossom all the more. As we accept and love people just as they are, they become more beautiful and have even more to give. What an inducement that should be for us not to meddle with the miracle.