David McElroy

I had a realization Wednesday night that seems profound, but I can’t think of any way to say it that won’t make me sound like an idiot or a fool. Maybe both.

Becoming the man I need to be — especially in the spiritual sense — is about addition, not subtraction.

If I visualize my life as a complex object or machine or organism, I have always seen myself as defective. I haven’t been fully conscious of this. As I’ve tried sincerely to improve myself and become who God wanted me to be, I’ve seen it as a matter of removing defective parts.

Everything about what I learned as a child — both at home and at church — oriented me toward this unconscious model.

At home, I constantly heard everything that was wrong with me. Everything that I needed to stop doing. At church, I learned all the ways that sin made us unacceptable to God. The lessons I learned from these two centers of my development taught me that I could be acceptable to God and to my family by closely following a set of rules.

I internalized those rules that I needed to follow, both from my family and from my church. Those rules became part of my core operating assumptions about life. Compared to most people I knew, I was very good at obeying all of those rules to the letter.

But what I overlooked was something much more profound.

As I followed all of the rules I was taught — and became closer and closer to being what everyone else seemed to call “good,” I wasn’t adequately replacing the “defective parts.”

I was removing the things I could call sin or bad behavior, but I wasn’t replacing what I removed with a truly changed heart.

I didn’t truly know how to love. Not God. Not others. Not even myself.

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I’ve been dealing with someone lately whose dishonesty is costing me a couple thousand dollars. Maybe a bit more.

I really want to be angry at him. I want to be bitter. I want to stone him — figuratively speaking — for what he’s done to me.

But I can’t throw this stone at him, because I’ve been a liar, too.

It’s hard for me to angrily attack someone else’s dishonesty — because my past hypocrisy shouts back and points its finger at me.

The longer I live, the more I understand that honesty is a fundamental value that goes to the core of what a person is. That sounds like something from a Boy Scout pledge or maybe a Sunday school lesson, but it’s genuinely foundational to a person’s character.

I haven’t always known this for myself, even though I would have given lip service to the principle all along.

I’ve told you before that I learned to be a very good liar as I grew up. I learned the nuances of lying — and the justifications for it — from the master liar who raised me. I was really good at it. And I didn’t see the contradiction in my life, much less the fracture it caused in my values and in my heart.

So what does all that mean when someone lies to me today?

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Were you on my website early Sunday morning — around 3:30 a.m. central time? Probably not, but if you happened to be, you would be represented on one of the dots on this map in my software showing the general location of my readers at any given moment. (The bigger the dot, the more readers from that city in that moment.)

It’s pretty cool, but it’s not especially useful. There used to be a different tool that could show me detailed information about exactly where readers were coming from during a full day (or any other period), but that tool is no longer available.

Today, I have only the vaguest notion of where my readers are coming from — and I’d really like to understand more. Would you be willing to help me? It would take only a few seconds of your time.

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