Anti-retroviral (adj) working against retroviruses, especially HIV.

The advantage of living your life and seeing the decades pass is realizing the blessing of coming across moments in time in which great transitions of spiritual awareness and social consciousness are transpiring, and knowing that you have an opportunity to acquire a better path of understanding instead of marching in the “asshole parade” down to spit in the river.

This happened to me in 1983.

Most people may forget that particular era, and I concur that much of it is worthy of a mental lapse. We were in a self-indulgent, pious, uncertain, semi-prospering, silly and trivial era.

While we were all prancing around admiring each other’s hairdos and duds, a virus arrived on the scene. The preliminary investigation of this deadly disease seemed to indicate that it was targeting the homosexual community. (Yes, back then, they were homosexuals, We were certainly not prepared for them to be “gay.”)

This played right into the hands of many opponents of the lifestyle, and there was word on the street that it was a “gay plague,” sent by God to express His displeasure and anger over “huggy-kissy” with brothers and brothers and sisters with sisters.

Matter of fact, I found myself in the middle of several such discussions, as people shook their heads, displaying a bit of awe and wonder over the power of God in expressing His judgment.

It would have been very easy to keep my mouth shut–and I suppose, more profitable for the sale of my books and such.

But there are two things I knew to be true:

God is love.

I refuse to believe that love has to kill anything to make its point.

And secondly, if God is so uncreative that the only way He can express Himself is by cursing those who disagree with Him, I find Him extraordinarily boring.

So since I knew that God was love and I did have an interest in Him, I surmised that a terrible sickness had come into our midst which would eventually affect everybody, so the sooner we found medication or perhaps a vaccine for this horror, the better off we would be.

Knowing that the most intelligent practice in fighting any evil is to engage your wallet, I donated to study and conquer this virus, which eventually became known as AIDS.

Cooler heads prevailed, and once they were cooled down, they began to think again. Isn’t that amazing?

And soon a drastic cocktail of concoctions was mixed together, and even though it was extraordinarily vicious in its side-effects, it addressed an aching need and saved thousands of lives.

So what is my conclusion?

People who believe in a God who is still stuck somewhere on Mt. Sinai, afraid to climb down, are soon forgotten.

And those who believe in a God who walks on water to help His children … live to praise Him and help others.

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