David McElroy

Some children are magnetic to other kids. They fit well in groups, because they’re so much like the others. Everybody loves them.

I was not that child.

My friends tended to be the brainy nerds and unique outcasts of the neighborhood. If everybody was playing and being social, my interests just weren’t like most people’s. I didn’t understand them, because they seemed so stupid and immature to me, which probably would have seemed strange coming from this tiny boy.

The other kids wanted me around when things needed to get done. When something needed to be built and nobody had a plan, I took charge. When students at school divided into teams for academic competition, kids wanted me to lead their team. If other kids were confused about what to do, they often turned to me.

But that didn’t mean they liked me.

I pretended I didn’t care whether people liked me, but I cared more than I wanted to admit, even to myself. I didn’t know how to be like them. It’s not that I wanted to change myself to be like them. I just wanted to find people more like me.

All these years later, I still feel the same way.

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Every single time you get outraged at something in the news media or something posted on social media, someone makes some money. These media companies have a vested interest in keeping you outraged — so you’ll keep watching and reading and angrily writing comments.

Although this is great for those companies, it’s terrible for the rest of us. It’s doing great damage to this society and it’s doing horrible psychological damage to us as individuals.

Isn’t it time that we considered whether Jesus might not have been onto some wisdom when he said we should gouge out an eye if it causes us to stumble? Shouldn’t we be removing things from our lives which are doing this sort of damage to all of us?

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The little boy in me fears punishment, so I have been very good.

Like an obedient robot — one who tightly follows an outwardly imposed order but who has no will of his own — I have followed a rigid path which I saw as good. I have followed my programming, even after my programmer was dead. And I still fear the dark desires of my heart which might lead to corruption or sin.

I was expected to be perfect. I believed I should be — and could be — perfect. I felt shame when I deviated from my script in any way. I felt happy only when I could point to my apparent perfection and say, “Please tell me what a good boy I am!”

I thought everyone who was decent was doing the same thing. Those who weren’t following the same perfect path — or desperately trying to — were bad people. I associated everything good as being of the mind and spirit. The physical desires of the body were bad. Those were the things that took people into sin. My childhood programming and my religious teaching agreed.

The flesh was evil. I had to resist it.

The inner conflict of my life has been between the “good” part of me striving to be without fault and the “bad” part of me which wanted to feed my sinful desires.

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