David McElroy

I’ve heard her name dozens of times, but I can’t remember what it is. She’s the one who nobody at her job likes. She’s the one who gets talked about when she’s not around.

But when I saw her Thursday, her face caught my attention. She was on a break from work. She was sitting quietly. Her face was blank, but she looked stressed — and she looked as though she might’ve been crying.

I sat down next to her. I can’t claim I was being kind or generous. It was out of instinct, not because I really wanted to. I couldn’t ignore someone who appeared to be in distress, even if her co-workers’ stories had prepared me to dislike her.

I wasn’t sure how to start, so I just told her I hadn’t seen her in the store recently. She told me she had been in a hospital — in an intensive care unit — for a week.

There was pain in her face. It wasn’t physical pain, but emotional distress.

As her story tumbled out, a lot of things suddenly made sense. She was no longer just a 21-year-old who snapped at co-workers and seemed to pick fights for little reason.

She was suddenly a young woman who had been battling a serious medical issue for the last year. She was someone who just had a hysterectomy because of the medical problem. She was a woman who desperately wanted to have children — and who just had to face the fact that she will never have children.

I was ashamed of myself for having judged her.

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I have been a stranger in this place all my life.

An alien. Just a visitor.

I was born among a people who I didn’t understand. A society that felt alien. A culture that felt cruel and perverted.

All my life, I have struggled between two competing compulsions. Part of me felt as though I had to fit in here. I felt that I had to conform. I had to become acceptable to the people around me — the ones who were so quick to judge me and ridicule me when I didn’t imitate them.

The other part of me has always been searching for a home that I knew was somewhere else. That part of me knew that I was an alien among these people. That part knew that I was looking for something. A person? A place? A force? I didn’t know.

The more I understood that I was a stranger in this land, the more I vaguely conceived that I was looking for another place. Not a physical place that’s on a map. I was looking for the place where I would find this “something” that I was compelled to find.

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This world is a fallen cesspool of hate and misery and sin. There is no hope here.

This world is also beautiful and loving and perfect. It’s a divine miracle.

How can both of these be true?

When I entered this chapel to pray late Tuesday afternoon, my frustrated and chaotic mind was firmly fixed on seeing the world at its worst. I saw an image of a world where the people are bumper to bumper on a highway to a hell of their own making.

In the silence and solitude of the next 90 minutes, my mind was filled with the beauty and the wonder and the love of a miraculous realm. It wasn’t just a fantasy, though. I saw bits and pieces of that loving world in people I knew.

As I prayed and meditated over these thoughts, I saw the worst of the world very clearly, but I also saw the best of the world. I struggled to see which one was the truth.

Then I suddenly realized that the window on the front wall of the chapel was like a metaphor. We can choose to focus on the world “out there” — the cesspool we see on the news and all over social media — or we can focus on the loving truth “in here.”

They’re both real. Both worlds are the truth.

But it’s our choice which one to focus on. It’s our choice which one to experience. And it’s our choice which one we choose for our own lives.

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