David McElroy

This world is a fallen cesspool of hate and misery and sin. There is no hope here.

This world is also beautiful and loving and perfect. It’s a divine miracle.

How can both of these be true?

When I entered this chapel to pray late Tuesday afternoon, my frustrated and chaotic mind was firmly fixed on seeing the world at its worst. I saw an image of a world where the people are bumper to bumper on a highway to a hell of their own making.

In the silence and solitude of the next 90 minutes, my mind was filled with the beauty and the wonder and the love of a miraculous realm. It wasn’t just a fantasy, though. I saw bits and pieces of that loving world in people I knew.

As I prayed and meditated over these thoughts, I saw the worst of the world very clearly, but I also saw the best of the world. I struggled to see which one was the truth.

Then I suddenly realized that the window on the front wall of the chapel was like a metaphor. We can choose to focus on the world “out there” — the cesspool we see on the news and all over social media — or we can focus on the loving truth “in here.”

They’re both real. Both worlds are the truth.

But it’s our choice which one to focus on. It’s our choice which one to experience. And it’s our choice which one we choose for our own lives.

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Aunt Bessie was one of the best human beings I’ve ever known.

She was kind and loving. She had a gentle spirit. I can’t remember her ever saying anything negative about anyone, even if the person deserved it. She was always eager to help those in need. She wasn’t wealthy, but she gave sacrificially to her church and to other ministries.

But Aunt Bessie knew little about theology. She didn’t have much education. She prayed constantly for other people — including for my sisters and me — and she read her Bible all the time. In a private conversation at her house while I was still in college, though — just a few years before she died — she admitted to me that she struggled to understand the language of the King James Bible.

That lack of intellectual understanding of scripture troubled her, she said, but she just knew she loved God and trusted in Jesus with her whole heart. She wanted to be the best person she knew how to be and live as she thought God wanted.

Now let me tell you about someone entirely different.

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Almost nothing is left of all the things I felt so certain about when I was young.

It’s not just that I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew. It’s worse. What I’ve slowly realized is that much of what I knew at the time — even that which I was certain about — was wrong. I’ve had to unlearn many of those things.

In some ways, it would have been easier if I had simply been ignorant. If I don’t know something, there’s an empty space where truth can eventually fit. I can learn something new and fill in what I didn’t know before.

But when I already “know” something that isn’t true, there’s no empty space. The space is already occupied by something false.

And that false belief changes the way I understand everything else.

I can look directly at evidence that ought to tell me I’m wrong and find some way to explain it away. (I’m really good at that.) I can encounter something that ought to be obvious and fail to see it because it doesn’t fit what I already “know.” I can spend years trying to make new pieces of truth fit into an old framework that was wrong from the beginning.

Sometimes we can’t learn the truth until we first unlearn the falsehood that makes the truth seem impossible.

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