David McElroy

They didn’t seem like people I would like. I was walking down a long aisle at Walmart behind a couple and a boy who I assume was their son. They were snapping at each other about some disagreement.

He called her a “bitch” several times. She had a choice word she called him, but I won’t even repeat that one. They didn’t seem to care that anyone else was around. The young boy just walked in silence.

Then I noticed the back of the woman’s t-shirt. I had trouble reading the typeface at a distance at first, but then I realized what it said.

“Take me as I am or watch me as I go.”

My first thought was to laughingly think a man would be lucky to watch her leave, but then I thought more seriously that the slogan sounded like an attitude they might both share. And then it occurred to me that this is a common attitude among modern people who don’t want to see their own flaws and their own responsibility to improve themselves.

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This has been a difficult week — and I feel very alone tonight.

How can I possibly feel lonely when I spend most of my days surrounded by people? I can talk with friends. I can talk with co-workers. I can even walk into half a dozen restaurants and stores nearby and find people who are glad to see me.

But none of that is any comfort tonight. The truth is that my surface-level interactions with most people make me feel profoundly alienated. Maybe it’s my fault. I really don’t know.

In the scripture which recounts the Jewish creation story, God realizes after He’s created Adam that he needs a partner. In Genesis 2:18, God is quoted as saying, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Although we rush right by this statement in the creation narrative, I think it’s one of the most profound theological insights of scripture.

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I was 12 years old when we moved to Pensacola, Fla., and I was enrolled in a brand new school. It was my seventh school so far if you counted kindergarten, so I was accustomed to being the new kid.

But I had never experienced anything quite so different. I had always been in middle class suburban schools where almost everybody looked and acted like me. But when we moved to Pensacola, we lived on the beach — and the beach kids were bused all the way to the inner city, where nobody looked like me.

Academics were terrible and the classes were way behind where I’d been in my previous schools. Mostly, though, it was a different culture. There was only one other white boy in all of the seventh grade. Almost every student in the school was black and they came from homes and neighborhoods very different from mine. It was a culture clash.

On one of my first days at the school, a knot of kids gathered around me in a hallway to make fun of my pants.

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