David McElroy

Try to imagine that you’ve never seen a sunset.

Now picture yourself on top of a mountain in the evening. You look to the west and see clouds. As the sun sinks beyond the horizon, the sky starts filling with dramatic color. The light show is stunning, because the sky which had been just blue and gray and white only minutes before looks like something out of a dream.

You don’t know what this is. You might feel awe. You might feel scared. You might feel like worshipping a Creator who is making this happen. You might feel a hundred different things. But your heart would know you were witnessing something majestic and stunning and powerful.

If you know what this is, you just call it a sunset and enjoy it. You understand the way it works and why it happens. But until you’ve experienced it and come to understand it, there is no way you could imagine such a stunning natural spectacle. You would have no frame of reference for it.

Right now, I am trying to create something brand new. I can almost see it, but I’m still blind. I can feel it. I’m stumbling toward something that is brand new — and it is as different to me as it would be to experience a sunset for the first time.

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The quality of your life is determined largely by the meaning you find in the relationships you choose, but many of us end up with broken relationships that need to be repaired. What’s just as bad is that we waste time with relationships that need to die.

We forget that the time we spend on a toxic relationship is time we can’t spend on a more healthy one. This is true whether it’s a romantic relationship or a close friendship or a family relationship.

The quality of our lives will change depending on the choices we make about shedding what she be dumped and healing the relationship that need to be repaired.

Preview of next week’s show: Why do we so often make the mistake of begging someone else to love us or to choose us? Don’t we understand that when we put so little value on ourselves that we beg for someone to love us, we’re setting ourselves up to be hurt — and we’re sending the other person a signal that we need them more than they need us.

You can’t force someone to believe you are worth making a priority. If you try, you will end up bitter, hurt and angry. If a person doesn’t value you enough to make you a priority, it doesn’t matter what he or she says — even if the words are, “I love you.”

Love is lived out through priorities and actions, not words and wishes. If you wait and beg to become someone’s priority, you’re not showing how much you love someone else. You’re showing how little you value yourself.

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Where is the line between what’s real and what’s just the wispy figment of dreams?

For years, I’ve dreamed about meeting a woman and a little girl at an underground train station. One of them — the woman, I believe — is wearing a solid red coat. Her daughter’s coat is either black or gray. They’re meeting me here, but I’ve never known why.

In the last week, I’ve dreamed about that station twice, for the first time in a long time. But there was something entirely different this time. In the dream, I was in my own house — not the modest house where I live now, but a grander house — and I heard a woman’s voice call to me from behind a wall.

I reached out with my hands and broke through the wall — ridiculous, of course — and discovered a secret stone stairway that led to a lower level. When I followed the stairs, I came out on a giant abandoned train platform. It was the same one from my old dreams.

This train station I’d seen for years was hidden under my own home. And the woman was there, too.

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