David McElroy

I had come to the restaurant to write. The place was mostly empty in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. I should have gotten a lot of writing done, but Robert had other ideas.

Robert is a talker. His dad works in the kitchen of the restaurant and had been called in to finish someone else’s shift, so Robert tagged along to wait for him. He quickly struck up a conversation with me.

Robert is in the third grade and he wanted to tell me all about his life. He’s a golfer, he said, but people frequently ask him whether he’s a quarterback on a football team. He and his family have five cats and the one called Boo Bear is is favorite. (Boo Bear sleeps with him.) He’s going to be a firefighter or maybe “something easy” like a landscaper.

There was nothing extraordinary about Robert’s story, but everything about this sweet kid sparkled with life and wit and happiness. That such a thing is so ordinary is extraordinary in itself.

I’m not exactly sure whether children gravitate to me or whether I gravitate to them, but I constantly seem to end up interacting with them. In another restaurant this week, I had another “ordinary extraordinary” encounter.

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I looked across the table at Nicole’s face. I was intimately familiar with every single bit of her beautiful face. We had dated for several years and we were engaged to be married. But I suddenly saw her as though it was for the first time.

“I can’t marry you,” I thought to myself. “I absolutely can’t marry you. We’re not right for each other.”

I had known this for a long time, but I had been lying to myself. On the surface, Nicole was everything I could want. She was a tall, beautiful and well-educated woman from the Midwest. She had moved to Birmingham because she loved me and wanted a future with me.

I had been lying to myself about her for quite some time. After I broke up with her early in the relationship and she begged me to give us another chance, I relented — even though I knew better. When she told me she wanted to move down here for us to date full time, I didn’t promise her anything, but I also didn’t tell her what I knew — that it wouldn’t work.

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I know things that I should have no way of knowing. I always have.

This is something I rarely admit to others, because I’ve been taught not to trust what I know. We live in an age when bright people learn that the only things to trust are reason and science. We learn that if something can’t be proven, it must not be true.

And yet — I know things. I’m scared to trust them, but I know things.

Science and reason have brought us amazing things. I have no desire to toss them aside. But I also know that I have knowledge and wisdom which come from somewhere else. I admit this with fear of what you’ll think of me, because I know materialists scoff at such irrational thinking. They see it as magical thinking. But something inside you knows the Truth.

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