Tag Archives: blessing

Amen

dictionary with letter A

Amen: (exclam) 1. uttered at the end of a prayer, meaning “so be it.” 2. used to express agreement or assent

Turning my TV channels in the wee hours of the morning, I stumbled across a whole series of religious programs, proffering their view of the holiness of God and the varying degrees of the depravity of man.

Although they were quite different in appearance and style, their content was similar in one remarkable way: every once in a while, as the speaker was touting his or her revelation, they would stop and say, “Can I get an amen?”

After a while, it lost some of its charm and spontaneity and began to reek of desperation. It was similar to pausing in the middle of a romantic encounter and asking your partner what she thinks of your lip technique. Or going to have a new tire put on your car and having the attendant insist that you come and watch him and grunt your approval during the process.

It just isn’t very attractive in the human experience to be so needy that you feel compelled to demand reinforcement.

I know we’re supposed to tell people we love them, but honestly, after a while, it sniffs more of platitude than it does gratitude.

An “amen” should come forth when the audience spontaneously feels energized by a notion or a prayer that causes them to give voice to their support.

I don’t like to go to a concert and have the group onstage, before they have even sung a note, insist that we all begin clapping. I don’t like being forced to stand up and I don’t want to be “rallied” to a cause which is either not clear to me or has not stimulated much enthusiasm in my soul.

If we do too many charlatan actions in our lives, faking our zeal, we soon will forget what it’s like to be overtaken by joy, overwhelmed by blessing and swept along by the magic of great ideas.

As I watched the shows last night and the camera scanned the audience, they were a strange mixture of bewilderment and submission.

If God needs me to merely perform the function of a pawn which He pushes across a chess board to generate the appearance of movement, then honestly, I’m not particularly interested.

But I am fully prepared to be affected, stimulated and rejuvenated … at any time.

Ambush

dictionary with letter A

Ambush: 1. (n) a surprise attack by people lying in wait in a concealed position 2. (v) to make a surprise attack on someone from a concealed position

It all depends from what perspective you view this experience.

If you are the ambusher, you find your tactics to be clever, inventive, cost-saving and ingenious.

If you are the ambushee, you will contend that the same actions are conniving, vicious, unfair and animalistic.

We think that certain behavior is acceptable as long as we come up with it and implement it to our common good. It is what makes us both human and obnoxious.

Candidly, a world without a Golden Rule, which insists that we try on an experience to see how it feels if done unto ourselves before we target it toward another person–well, a world without that kind of consideration is vile, unpredictable and destructive.

How can we ambush other people while thinking that all we’re trying to do is communicate our feelings?

1. If another human being doesn’t have the right to disagree without looking ridiculous, then we’ve robbed them of their God-given blessing of purpose and individuality.

2. If our sharing with another person is done in front of other folks for convenience or back-up, we have removed the generosity that allows our friends to repent if they’ve erred and to learn if they lack information.

3. The instinct to capture folks in their moment of weakness and attack them is never noble, even if we think it’s producing spiritual conclusions.

Here’s the truth: human beings don’t have to be right.

God, Himself, does not go around plotting trials and tribulations for those who are in rebellion to reason. That’s why the Good Book says “it rains on the just and the unjust” and “the sun shines on the good and the bad.”

So if God doesn’t ambush jerks, get your helmet off. There’s no war.

And “ambush” is a term we normally relegate to warfare–when being devious and even ruthless, unfortunately, may be necessary to win the battle and save lives.

But to introduce this concept into everyday interactions with humankind is not only cruel, but in this humble writer’s opinion … damnable.

 

Allotment

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Allotment: (n) the specified amount  of something allocated to a person

Sometimes it’s not that words are bad. It’s just the company they keep.

I remember when I was in school. We had a principal and a vice principal, and I discovered after a while that the job of the vice principal was to wander the halls and tell the students why certain things couldn’t be bought for the school. It was because there was no allotment in the budget.

Yes, he was there to douse all hope for improvement, blessing or pleasure.

Somewhere along the line, good news has to be brought to human beings or we become old way too soon and cranky without needing to manifest such a negative emotion.

I know there are people who make their living teaching others how to budget money. Actually, there are famous public speakers and motivational authors who travel the country, instructing in financial solvency and ways to make sure that you don’t “live beyond your means.”

It’s difficult to find fault with them, but in some ways, I still do.

Because the thing I know above all else is that coming out in the black at the end of the month can often be a reflection on your mood. The amount of pain, struggle, scrimping and self-righteous hoarding often done to achieve a balanced budget is certainly admirable, but not very pleasurable.

Sometimes you have to step out of the “allotment” and go with the moment’s sensation of celebrating the goodness of life. I know it’s irresponsible. I know it’s the kind of thing that maybe our ancestors would have frowned upon, but I occasionally find out that there isn’t an actual allotment for anything of value, yet value is still required.

And if faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, then to believe that we cannot launch out in faith without peering at it in our wallets may be against the whole concept in the first place.

Sometimes what we need, require and dream is more important than making all the aspects of our lives add up.

  • I know it’s risky.
  • I know I’ve been foolish and ended up looking fool-hardy.

But life is more than allotments. It’s reaching the last breath of your time on the planet … and smiling because you did it well.

All

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

All: (adj & pron.) referring to the whole quantity or extent of a particular group or thing

As a writer, it’s a word I don’t get to use very often–because putting it to work immediately conjures an image of inclusion without exception.

In other words: “all the people suck.”

You can imagine, there would be some objection to that sentiment.

Even if you trimmed it down to “most people suck,” you might be accused of being overwrought.

“Some of the people suck” is more temperate, but still appears that you think all the people suck and you’re just playing it safe.

So most writers, to protect themselves from the marauding horde of critics, will use the preferable: “a few.”

Yes. A few people suck.

This enables the reader to escape the condemnation of being a sucker, and determine, in his or her own mind, who the rejected few might be.

But there are things I hope really will continue to be believed as applicable to all:

  • How about liberty and justice for all?
  • How about God loving all the world?
  • I like this one: All our possibilities are possible as long as we don’t deem them impossible.
  • All we have to do is love one another.
  • All human beings are equal.

So to me, “all” is a word of aspiration, faith and welcoming. And even though I am careful not to use it when I get in a gruff mood–to rain my verbal fire and brimstone down from my personal heavenly perch–I do greatly enjoy including all my brothers and sisters … when I know blessing is waiting around the bend.

 

AIDS

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

AIDS: (n) Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a disease in which there is a severe loss of the body’s cellular immunity, greatly lowering the resistance to infection and malignancy.

Honestly, when the first reports came out on HIV, I didn’t take it very seriously.

Why? Because there’s always some new disease or bird flu they’re trying to frighten us with, to procure our listenership on some news broadcast.

Even when it was obvious that many people were contracting the disease, and famous folks like Rock Hudson were passing away, I still didn’t quite grasp the concept.

Truthfully, it was a little difficult to get past the “screamers.” You know what I mean by screamers, right?

You had the gay community, which insisted that no one cared because the disease was manifesting itself within their conclave.

And the Moral Majority, proclaiming it to be the “gay plague.”

So I don’t think the brunt of the reality of HIV and AIDS hit me until I received the phone call. It was a young lady who had performed in one of my plays years previously. She was in tears. She explained to me that she was HIV positive and was married to a man who was the same. The reason for her call, though, was that she had discovered she was pregnant and wanted us to pray that the baby would not be born infested with the virus.

Here in the confines of one family was nearly every conceivable way to contract this affliction. The girl had become infected by heterosexual sex, the man, through homosexual contact, and the baby was being threatened by merely exchanging blood with its mother.

Suddenly, the full impact and horror of the infestation was brought home to me. Even though all of these people I mentioned are still alive due to progress made with pharmaceuticals, my heart is always softened to the notion of a person touched by this horrendous condition when I remember the three of them.

Perhaps that’s the way we all are.

Until something jumps over our white picket fence and lands in our yard, we feel we can repel it or ignore it. I guess we can be critical of that, or we can be fully cognizant that God is no respecter of persons:

Just as blessing comes to all b… so does trial and the tribulation.

Acts (Book of)

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

 

Acts:  a New Testament book immediately following the Gospels and relating the history of the early Church.

During the several times in my life when I have read the Bible from cover to cover—and let me candidly admit that even though there IS a blessing in the perusing, I would also have to deem it a chore—I discovered that the Bible has so much arcane language which does not fall into my purview and ideas which can be interpreted so many different ways, that it certainly demands a gentle spirit for consumption.

This is definitely true of the Book of Acts. While some people critique the Gospels which have the accounts of the life of Jesus, in being abbreviated in detail, focused on a particular audience of the day, the Book of Acts is really like a corporate press release.

First of all, you have to consider that the time span covered in the entire work is between sixty and seventy years. Once it’s condensed and crushed together into its twenty-eight chapters, you feel like it’s a description of a couple of weekends’ vacationing in Jerusalem. The huge transitions in plot, miraculous achievements and even the struggles seem monumental rather than the typical day-to-day inch-worm progress which is actually accomplished by human beings.

But there IS one thing we certainly learn from the Book of Acts: when Christians and Jews tried to combine their theologies, it fails miserably.

I’m not saying that Christians and Jews can’t get along as folks and friends, but the faith that was established by Jesus of Nazareth was not exactly complementary to the Law of Moses.

When these early Jewish boys who were followers of Jesus tried to incorporate their Mom and Dad’s religion into the new movement, it just didn’t work out very well.

So because of that, a Pharisee named Saul took the journey to become Paul the Apostle, and translated the message to a whole world of non-circumcised individuals. So faith in God went from being an issue of whether your penis was trimmed or not to whether your heart was open.

It was an arduous task, which as I previously stated, took many decades. With the Book of Acts, we basically get the Reader’s Digest version, written by a physician named Luke.

Even though I appreciate te account and the inclusion of the struggle, I do think we miss the magnitude of human folly in the pursuit of better understanding.

Christianity wouldn’t have moved out of the Upper Room in Jerusalem had it not been for a guy named Paul.

And mankind would never have departed from the superstitions of Mesopotamia had it not been for the teachings … of Jesus.