David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

If you don’t have a burden in life, you probably won’t achieve much

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Atlanta pastor Andy Stanley grew up in a home with one of the most popular Southern Baptist pastors in the country, so he saw many major pastors and religious leaders come through his home when he was a kid.

Stanley said there were certain ones which would cause his father to later say with a shake of his head — in the privacy of the family — “that man doesn’t have a burden.”

What did Charles Stanley mean by that? It was his judgment that a particular pastor might be talented and popular and respected, but the man wasn’t driven inside by a burden for anything he was trying to change or anyone he was trying to help.

That phrase resonated with me when I heard it this week in an interview with Andy Stanley. Maybe it makes so much sense to me because I’ve heard it used in church all my life. People who talked about having a burning need to minister to certain people would talk about having a burden for them: “I have a burden for young people who are growing up in broken homes,” or, “I have a burden for young mothers who have been abused and have nowhere to go.”

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Almost all of us feel alienation if we don’t find a place to call home

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As I observed the people around me in the restaurant Sunday afternoon, I felt annoyed. I didn’t like these people — and I don’t figure they would really like me.

If I described the things I didn’t like about these folks, you would probably feel as though I was being petty. Maybe even judgmental. They didn’t look like me, talk like me, or act like me. Everything about them rubbed me the wrong way.

I feel this way a lot lately. I suspect most Americans feel the same. In our own varied ways, most of us are asking, “How could this be possible in my country?”

Conservatives might look at gay marriage and marijuana legalization and an apparent flood of immigrants in their cities — and wonder what went wrong for the world they believe in. Progressives might look at neo-Nazis marching and “voter suppression” in elections and a flood of hatred for immigrants — and wonder what went wrong for the world they believe in.

In a world where the words and actions of people who disagree with us are slammed into our faces by 24-hour news media, most of us have a vague sense that something’s wrong. Some react by saying, “I want my country back,” but what they’re really saying is what we all feel. We all long for a place that feels like home.

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Sad husband: ‘My beautiful wife is dying; I’m so sad I can’t sleep’

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The yellowed face in the picture caught my attention when I noticed the pinkish color of the healthy hand on her forehead. And then I noticed the man’s summary of his story.

“Here she is, Teresa,” the anonymous man wrote on a social media post. “She’s the love of my life, and today is her birthday. And she’s dying.”

This is not my story. I have very little to add to it. But this couple’s story touched me. There’s nothing we can do to help them. But Teresa is dying of liver disease and he’s terrified and heartbroken. The very least we can do is listen to their story.

“She’s getting sicker every day,” the husband writes. “She gets confused from high ammonia levels. She’s yellow because her liver is failing. She’s in pain, and can’t take anything because of the bad liver.”

In the midst of their fear and pain, he recounts that he’s thankful that Teresa walked into the company where he worked around 8 a.m. on Sept. 23, 1983. He said he had to work up the courage to ask her out — and he worded the question vaguely in case she turned him down. But he had to ask her out, he said, because “I fell in love with her eyes the first time I saw her.”

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