David McElroy

The man sounded genuinely surprised. Shocked, even. He hadn’t seen this coming.

He was calling to tell me some terrible news about his son. The kid had done something stupid. Again. This time, it’s going to have life-changing consequences. And I should mention that this irresponsible child isn’t 16. He’s 24.

But my friend has spent a couple of decades enabling this overgrown child to be irresponsible — and the kid has never faced any consequences. But even though everybody else could see the pattern — and could see where things were inevitably leading — my friend seemed shocked.

I kept my mouth shut, but what I was listening to made me feel crazy.

If you smash a hammer into a porcelain teacup, the cup is going to shatter into tiny pieces. It would be crazy to be surprised at the result. Any rational person knew the outcome before the hammer reached the cup. The outcome was inevitable when the choice was made.

But we go through life — both individually and as a culture — acting bewildered when our actions produce their inevitable results.

When I see this playing out — in the lives of my friends and in the life of my culture — it makes me feel as though I must be crazy. And it leaves me desperate to get away from the insane drama that produces this sort of chaotic dysfunction.

People spend months or years or even decades creating insanity in their lives — and then they seem surprised when the inevitable results of their decisions suddenly show up.

Keep Reading

The church bus was dark and quiet as we rolled through the middle of Arkansas late at night. We were on the way back to Alabama from a youth mission trip to Oklahoma City. But I was terrified — with a racing heart and sweaty palms — because of what I was about to ask the beautiful woman sitting next to me.

Gail and I were both freshmen in college. We had known each other for years. I had had a crush on her when we were in junior high school, but she had become just another girl in my graduating class by the time we finished high school.

We had reconnected a few months before this because of a college class we shared. We had first started talking. Then we started spending time together. I had fallen for her — but I was terrified that maybe she just saw me as a friend.

The time had come for me to ask her if she was willing to have a romantic relationship with me.

I have no idea what I said, but I somehow got the words out. She gladly accepted the offer. My heart was full and I thought my life would never be the same again.

Keep Reading

If my parents had left me millions of dollars, I doubt I’d have overlooked it.

Instead, they left me something far more valuable — and I had overlooked that inheritance for most of my life. At least consciously.

My family was anything but a model of stability and mental health. My father suffered from what I now know was narcissistic personality disorder. My mother left us when I was 5 years old and drifted in and out of my life for years afterward. I’ve written extensively about both of those realities because they shaped me in profound ways — rarely for the better.

But life has a way of refusing to fit neatly into the categories we’d prefer. The same parents who left me with painful memories also left me with an inheritance that has quietly benefited me every day of my adult life.

Neither of them left me wealth. They left me something much harder to recognize because it became so completely woven into my daily life that I stopped noticing it.

Keep Reading