David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Every addiction is heart’s effort to fill inner hole that requires love

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It’s easy for me to be disdainful of your addiction, whatever it is.

I don’t want to admit that I sometimes feel this way about others, but it’s true. I’m probably just being defensive, because disdaining others’ addictions is a good distraction from dealing with the core issues involved with my own.

People are addicted to all sorts of things. Alcohol. Gambling. Sex. Shopping. Other recreational drugs. Television. Gaming. Social media. The list is endless. It seems as though almost anything pleasant can be turned into an addiction.

For me, it’s food, especially sugar. I keep myself overweight and sluggish when I’m unhappy, all because I’m pulled back again and again to the bizarre compulsion to eat when I’m not hungry. At the heart of the matter, it’s not about taste or gluttony or brain chemistry. It’s all about the need to find the love and understanding and security which I’ve never had.

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Google’s geeks offer future vision that leads toward inhuman world

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The capabilities of Google’s next-generation Assistant are technically stunning, at least in the stage demo shown to the public Tuesday. The people behind this are brilliant and they’ve apparently solved some very difficult software problems. The result is software that can make a call for you and pretend to be human, as well as write your emails based on what it thinks you were going to say.

But as technically impressive as the demonstrations were, I’m left very uncomfortable with the vision that Google wants to sell to us. In a world that already seems colder and more sterile every day, the last thing I want is software that suggests what I ought to write and misleads people into believing it’s a human calling.

What Google is offering is creepy and disturbing. It’s technically impressive, but I absolutely, positively do not want this technology.

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Whether it makes sense or not, I’ve learned to expect miracles

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The little placard was a fixture at my Aunt Bessie’s house when I was young. She was really my great aunt, so she seemed old for my entire life. She wasn’t an educated woman, so she couldn’t have explained the theology behind it, but she had a powerful faith in God. On top of her huge old wooden console television, the words were always there in her living room.

“Expect a miracle.”

I didn’t really understand that in real-world terms. I knew about miracles from stories in the Bible, but I didn’t expect Moses to come along and part the Red Sea. I didn’t expect God to keep three young men from burning to death in a fiery furnace. I didn’t expect Jesus to come heal the sick.

But my Aunt Bessie did expect miracles. It took me awhile to understand, but Aunt Bessie’s influence finally rubbed off on me — because I expect miracles today, whether they make sense or not.

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