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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Reconciliation can start with the courage to make one phone call

By David McElroy · September 10, 2020

I was stuck in traffic on I-20 just east of Birmingham Thursday evening when my phone rang. In the previous 30 minutes, traffic had inched forward only about a hundred yards as emergency vehicles dealt with a wreck a mile or so ahead of us. I glanced at the ringing phone.

I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect to see her name. How long had it been since we had talked? I didn’t recall. Why was she calling?

Part of me wanted to let it go to voicemail. Things hadn’t ended on a pleasant note for us. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear from her. But I decided it would be cowardly to ignore the call, so I answered right before it would have gone to voicemail.

“I wasn’t sure you were going to answer,” she said.

”I almost didn’t,” I admitted.

We talked for about 20 minutes. At first, things felt tense. I was cautious since I didn’t know what she wanted. She was stumbling over her words, because — as she told me later in the conversation — she had been embarrassed to call.

She apologized for some things. The details don’t matter. She explained why she had done and said some things, but she admitted that explaining now didn’t mean she had been right at the time. She said she had known for a long time that she had been wrong, but her pride kept her from confessing that to me.

“I can’t go back and change anything now,” she said, “but I think we would have stayed together if I had been willing to call you a long time ago. I was willing to lose something I now regret losing just because I didn’t want to swallow my pride and call you.”

She asked for my forgiveness and I gladly gave it.

“Forgiveness is part of any relationship,” I said, “especially when you love someone.”

I don’t love her anymore. She never brought up the issue of whether she still loves me. It didn’t really matter. We just dealt with the past.

After we hung up, I drove to dinner thinking about forgiveness, but even more about the reasons we often don’t pursue reconciliation with those we love. Although it’s absurd, we often lose the relationships we need most — simply because we let something in our ego or personality get into the way of reaching out and making contact.

I sometimes allow my judgment of others to get into the way. If I am alienated from someone, I can tell you why — and I can list the reasons that it’s the other person’s fault. I can go over the details of what happened like the most skillful prosecutor. I can show you why you were wrong — and my hurting heart holds those things against you.

Other people have their own excuses. Some people are too arrogant. They can have too much pride to admit what they know in their hearts they ought to say. They can’t bring themselves to admit they might have been wrong — and so they lose what they really want just to avoid facing their fear of saying, “I was wrong.”

As I look back on my life, I see times when I needed to pick up a phone and call someone, but I didn’t. Other times, I’ve been willing to do the right thing. It’s varied.

I found myself realizing tonight that the process of forgiveness and reconciliation isn’t as “one way” as I might have always thought. In my conversation tonight, for instance, she called to ask forgiveness, but the conversation left me feeling as though it had been a two-way street — as though we had both asked for and received forgiveness.

Somehow, we both got something out of it. Even if I never talk to her again, there was power and there was peace in this feeling of being reconciled after so long.

If you need to reconcile with someone, isn’t this a perfect time to start? You can put aside your ego or your pride or your judgment. You don’t have to worry about what comes next. If you do what’s right, it will cleanse your soul, whether the other person accepts your peace offering or not.

Do you need to ask forgiveness? Do you need to reconcile a relationship that’s broken? Have the courage to pick up the phone and reach out right now.

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It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me, but she didn’t know that, so she was terrified that night. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. #dog #dogs #dogstagram #dogsofinstagram #cute #cutedog #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #instadog #ilovedogs #birmingham #alabama
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Briefly

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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