Tag Archives: encourage

Befriend

Befriend: (v) to act as a friend to someone by offering help or support.Dictionary B

$500.

That’s how much they were charging for a 1970 Corvette Stingray.

I was nineteen years of age and could not believe what I was reading in the advertisement.

It was a beautiful car, late-model, and my dear God…it was a Corvette. And they only wanted $500.

I just about broke my neck getting there, to see the vehicle, and when I arrived I was astounded that nobody else had shown up for the auction.

Now, even though $500 was well beyond my means, I would have done almost anything to get the money to buy the Corvette.

The gentleman selling the car explained that there was one big problem: a man had committed suicide in the car and no one had discovered him for three weeks.

It did creep me out a little bit, but I thought I could get over it–until he opened up the door and I sniffed the problem.

The odor of the decomposing body of the suicidal owner was absorbed into the fiberglass of the car.

Nobody was interested in a car that stunk.

It was beautiful on the outside and smelled rotten inside.

I passed.

Over the years, I have remembered that story in my dealings with human beings.

Even though it seems noble to befriend others and help out people in need, you have to make sure that no matter how good things look on the outside, that these individuals have taken time to go inside themselves and clean out the garbage.

Rotten people continue to do rotten things, until they decide to stop being rotten.

  • You can befriend them.
  • You can love them.
  • You can help them.
  • You can encourage them.
  • You can send them to a seminar to learn about self-esteem.

But it is up to them to remove the stink.

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

 

 

 

Admonish

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter AAdmonish: (v) to warn or reprimand someone firmly

I really do not know why this word is in the dictionary.

I suppose it’s there because we all have accidentally or ignorantly decided to admonish another human being, only to discover that we were given bad attitude, resistance and actually, more often than not, pushed them right back into their iniquity.

For after all, it is a word usually associated with child-rearing. You know–those occasions when we sit our offspring down and explain to them in vivid detail the error of their ways and the danger of their path.

But writing this essay today, I have to ask myself if I have EVER heeded an admonishment.

I have come to myself and decided to change certain behavior. But every time someone ELSE has made it his or her mission to create that change in me, I have resisted to the point of rebellion (although in the presence of other folks I might pretend I had heeded the heated advice).

But I didn’t.

Truthfully, I resented the hell out of someone treating me like I was a teenager taking the car out for a joy ride without permission.

This is why I yearned for my eighteenth birthday–so I wouldn’t have to listen to people tell me what to do. I am a typical son of Adam and Eve in the sense that if you tell me there’s a tree from which I should not eat, it is the location where I will probably decide to have lunch.

Honestly, it’s how I can tell that parts of the Bible ARE divinely inspired, and other portions are the inventions of men trapped in their own culture and time, who did their best to venture a good guess.

You can encourage people. I am not so certain you can admonish them.

You can exhort people. Admonishment will go out the back door as quickly as it came in the front.

You can steer, cheer, jeer, and leer at folks and probably get by with it. But when you sit them down and try to recreate the atmosphere that should have happened when they were children being instructed on Mommy and Daddy’s knees, you are about to unleash all the fury of their frustration.

So what can we do if we know that someone is destroying himself and is steeped in great error?

The two paths available to the wise man or woman who want to affect their world are:

  1. Set a great visible example
  2. Pray that God uses the natural order to bring truth to the forefront.

There you go.

So “admonish” is in the dictionary because we do it with our children–to limited success.

When we try to apply it to our adult friends, we have generated the definition for another word: futility.