Outer storms will end, but storms in my heart do lasting damage

By David McElroy · May 20, 2017

The sheets of rain lash down, almost maniacal in their resolve to pound everything in the way.

The lightning flashes blindingly. For a split second, there is silence, followed by the booming thunder nearby.

The water pounds and pounds. The thunder rumbles. The lightning comes again.

The storm is hitting my windshield and the wipers struggle to move the water. Their back and forth motion is hypnotic — and I wonder whether the storm I feel and hear and fear is really outside — or if it’s inside my heart.

It’s dark and it’s loud and it’s gloomy. The storm outside the car threatens me physically, but the storm inside threatens something far deeper. Far more existential. It’s pounding on my very core again.

The sheets of rain pound down like the notes of nature’s mad symphony.

One, two, three, four. Flash. Boom. One, two, three, four. Flash. boom.

There’s a rhythm to the violence. The notes hit harder, punctuated by the percussion of thunder and the flash of lightning.

Is this symphony the voice of God? Of the devil? Or of some mindless randomness that doesn’t care who it strikes?

A violent storm does damage, sometimes fleeting, sometimes lasting. Nature is tough, though. The trees and rocks and animals can take a pounding and remain strong. One tree or a dozen trees or even a hundred — maybe an entire forest — can be wiped out by a storm and others will rise to take their place.

Nature is patient. Nature has many centuries of time. Nature has resilience.

Not so with a human heart.

The heart hurts. The heart needs. The heart scars from accumulated wounds.

The heart can harden. The heart can wither. The heart can give up and start dying.

Love is the only thing that heals a wounded heart. Love is the only thing that softens a hard heart. Love is the only thing that can make a withering heart flourish and become vibrant again. Love is the only thing that can give a heart the hope to move forward with life and live again.

Every heart needs love. And a heart without love is vulnerable to the storms which I feel raging. The storms threaten to engulf and destroy.

My heart needs a love that comes and stays. The storm violently makes that clear again — the storm outside and the storm inside. But it’s not just any love my heart needs.

My heart needs a love that also needs what I have to give. A heart that wants what I want. A heart that cares about what I care about. A heart that recognizes its equal and its partner.

As the violent storm rages around me — and in me — I long again for a love to come and stay. A heart that knows what it wants. A heart that is unafraid. A heart that shares my values. A heart that wants to create and build and soar.

I long for a heart that will build a love that will matter this year and next year and next decade — a love that can kindle a flame that can last a thousand years, long after these two hearts have stopped beating.

But tonight, there is only the storm.

Once again, there is the lashing, violent rain and the thunder and the lightning. There are the maddening questions. The crippling doubt. The blinding pain.

The storms are powerful.

The storm outside will end soon and the sun will come out. The storm inside will rage and rage. Without elusive love, that storm seems endless.

One, two, three, four.

Questions, doubt, pain, fear.

The sheets of rain keep lashing against my wounded heart. I pray again for the storms to end, but there is no end in sight.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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