Crave

 Crave: (v) to long for

I am very familiar with three great cravings.

They are not unique to me nor can they be labeled by the simple titles “good and evil.” But I know that all three of these have, do and funny wisdom on words that begin with a Cprobably will wiggle their way into my thinking and manifest themselves as desires.

The trouble is, each craving demands that I take on a certain responsibility. Or maybe “responsibility” is over-spoken. It’s actually more like a chore.

1. I crave orgasm.

It feels good. It’s a pleasant burst. There’s just enough unpredictable about it that each encounter possesses uniqueness. It is a few brief seconds when I no longer care that I am human, and I allow all the animal stoked deep inside me to roar.

With this craving comes a chore. It’s called sex. Although we insist that sex is pleasurable, it is actually the orgasm that brings the ecstasy, and to achieve that we go through the practice, interaction, danger and mediocrity of sexual relations with another person.

This certainly is why masturbation is so popular.

2. I crave companionship.

The chore that comes with this particular quest is people.

Yes, unless I plan on having just dogs, cats and miscellaneous domesticated animals surrounding me, unable to carry on conversations, I will have to learn, understand and tolerate the actions of other Homo Sapiens.

The payoff is great, but the process is—well, shall we say, unending.

3. I crave immortality.

The chore with this, if you will, is dealing with God.

There is no evidence that I possess any likelihood of longevity beyond a century without a belief in an eternal home.

God becomes problematic.

He is so loving that He includes fools, religionists, shysters and the most boring theologians ever conjured in a seminary.

In my craving for orgasm, companionship and immortality I must survive the chores of sex, people and God.

There are times when I wonder if it’s worth it.

There are occasions I wish to be free of the entanglements and the conditions brought on in satisfying my cravings.

But usually, a good nap, a meal or allowing my mind to be free of pressure makes me once again a willing participant in the pursuit of what I crave.


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Boast

Boast: (v) to talk with excessive pride and self-satisfaction

Dictionary B

If doing it doesn’t give you an adequate boost of joyful satisfaction, then stop.

If you believe you need recognition, appreciation, applause or even space to perform your due diligence, you are destined to a life of sour despair.

There has to be joy in the doing, or the doing will become the burdensome chore of the malcontent.

I find that I’m only tempted to boast when I’m doing a job that really does not suit my taste and therefore needs to be bolstered by the admiration of others.

For instance, I was a writer long before I was read.

If I didn’t enjoy being a writer, I would have been absolutely miserable and would have made everyone around me fidgety as I complained about the arduous task of putting words on a screen.

I enjoyed it so I continued. If others end up finding purpose or pleasure in my phrasing and placement of notions, it’s just a magnificent manifestation.

If you find a boastful human, you will discover a soul who is not only insecure, but fearful that what they’re doing is a heap of meaningless.

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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.