David McElroy

I’ll be happy to tell you how to fix your life. I can easily look at your life and tell you what you’re doing wrong. It’s obvious to me. I’ll try not to be condescending when I explain it all to you, but we’ll both know I’m the superior one.

OK, not really. But I found myself thinking about some things Sunday afternoon that made it feel uncomfortably close to this arrogant and narcissistic attitude.

I saw some people in public and I started silently criticizing them to myself. I cataloged some of their flaws and errors. If I’m honest with myself — which I’d rather not be — the truth is that I was critical of them for things that aren’t problems for me. When I realized what I was doing, I recognized that arrogant old attitude once again.

“Why aren’t you people more like me?” something inside me silently sneered.

And once more, I was appalled that I was trying to feel better about myself by criticizing the flaws in others.

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Every story of redemption starts with a story of loss. Until a person recognizes his or her brokenness, there can be no story of redemption.

At some point in your life, something broke you. Maybe nobody else knows that. Maybe you’re good at hiding it. And maybe you don’t even admit it to yourself.

But somewhere along the way, we all get lost. We all get broken. Some people cover it up. Some people embrace the brokenness and claim they like living that way. Most of us live in denial about it for as long as we can.

Finding redemption is messy. It involves getting honest with ourselves and others. It means we finally stop lying and pretending. It means we give up our pride.

And this is the reason most people never find redemption for themselves. They choose to live with lies and denial rather than to face the painful truth, even though they long for something deeply transformative and they desperately wish for a way out of something they can’t quite identify.

The ones who never find redemption are tragic. The beautiful stories are of those who are deeply broken and lost, yet find hope and redemption. It‘s their stories I need to tell.

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If I tell you a secret, will you keep it just between the two of us?

OK. Here it comes. My new podcast isn’t very good yet. If you’ve already heard some of the episodes, you might be relieved to hear me say that. You might be thinking, “Well, duh. Everybody else knows this, but I’m surprised you admit it.”

I’m not just being self-denigrating when I say this. I mean it with all sincerity. But there’s something I have to add — which I think is the more important part of the story.

Roughly 98 percent of the podcasts out there — out of about 750,000 active podcasts right now — are dreadfully bad. And when I admit that my podcast isn’t very good, I’m saying that with the knowledge that my “not very good” podcast might already be in the top 25 percent in terms of quality — only because most podcasts are so incredibly awful.

This leaves me baffled at what most people are producing — and it also leaves me encouraged about my future prospects. Let me tell you what prompts this thought.

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