David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

As online holiday shopping starts, please use my Amazon affiliate link

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Every time I mention a book on here, I try to remember to include a link to buy that book at Amazon.com. You might have heard of them.

I’m not just including the link out of the kindness of my heart, of course. I’m a member of an Amazon program that pays me a small commission every time you buy something from there after you’ve clicked a link on my site.

I don’t make a ton of money from this — it probably averages $30 a month — but it helps offset the cost of cat and dog food. And right now, it can even help offset the cost of the long transition I’m going through to update the site to a new design and “plumbing” underneath the surface of what you see. (That upgrade has taken longer than I ever thought it would.)

But if you don’t mind, I’d like to explain how you can help support this site as you do online shopping in the next month or so — and it won’t cost you a nickel.

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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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