David McElroy

As I was getting gas for my car Sunday evening, a big church bus pulled into the parking lot. A few dozen noisy students from a Baptist church in Texas spilled out and headed inside for junk food to eat on the road.

I could have been one of those students not too many years ago. In high school, I was very involved in the youth group of my Baptist church in Jasper, Ala. We traveled in the summers through Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina. In my last year with the group — while I was a freshman in college — we traveled to Oklahoma City.

As I watched those students tonight, I saw a young man and young woman standing apart from the rest. They appeared to be a couple — and they reminded me of the night on a church bus when I nervously asked a young woman if she was wiling to date me.

I have to smile at how little I understood at that time, about love or life. Even though the young woman agreed that night to date me — and we were together for three years — I know now that neither of us had the knowledge or wisdom to know what we were doing.

And the worst thing about a human life is that we almost never have the wisdom or knowledge we need — until it’s too late to really use it.

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I dreamed I was in a burning office building. Flames were everywhere, but people around me acted as though nothing was wrong. They went about their work. They laughed and talked. There were children there, too. I remember a little girl in particular. Everybody seemed oblivious to the danger that was obvious to me.

I tried to get the attention of the people near me and I pointed to the flames. Nobody cared. I wanted to run out of the building to save myself, but I knew I should save as many people as I could — because people would be dying in mere minutes.

As the dream ended, I was conflicted and angry. Nobody was listening. I wanted to save them, but they wouldn’t see the danger. I couldn’t decide whether to keep trying to save them or just get out to save myself instead.

I woke up in a sweat, but I knew what the dream meant. In the last few weeks, I’ve been conflicted about the work I’m doing on the YouTube channel called DavidMcElroy.TV. I finished editing the first 10 episodes a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to post them.

I feel as though I’m casting myself in the role of an expert or a guru. Even a would-be hero. Or maybe an apocalyptic prophet from the Hebrew Bible, the sort who stumbles out of the wilderness to warn the people of hidden destruction just ahead.

And when I see myself that way — and when I realize how this plays into old egotistical desires of mine to be a leader and a hero — I want to stop everything.

It makes me want to stop talking publicly — to shut all of my media efforts down completely — and to disappear into comfortable obscurity without being concerned with what’s about to happen to others. With a few simple actions, I could shut down this site and delete my remaining social media footprint.

I don’t want to be anybody’s guru or hero or harbinger of doom. Is it time for me to disappear instead?

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I have trouble starting over. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a game, a business venture, a relationship or a job. If I find things going poorly, I want to walk away. I feel humiliated. I want to quit.

Starting over would be an admission of failure, that I hadn’t been good enough. It’s easier to just move on to something new, because I’m uncomfortable with the messiness of fixing something that’s gone wrong.

When I was a student at the University of Alabama, I had been dating a bright and beautiful nursing student for a few months. Then we had a disagreement about something. It was minor — and I don’t recall the details — but we stopped talking. I wanted to continue the relationship, but I wasn’t willing to go to her and say, “How can we work this out?”

I didn’t see this woman for several years. I had moved on and married someone else. Then I was in Tuscaloosa one day and ran into her. We talked about what had happened.

“I knew I was wrong,” she told me, “but I didn’t know how to admit that and reconcile things with you. I kept hoping you would call me again and we could start over, but since you didn’t, I figured you didn’t care and I gave up on us.”

I learned the truth too late. We had both wanted to reconcile, but neither one of us knew how to open the door and then start over.

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