Tag Archives: iniquity

Allay

Allay: (v) to diminish or put to rest.dictionary with letter A

I put some thought to it.

Actually, I’ve only heard this word used in relationship to fear.

I supposed you could “allay someone’s burden.” Or possibly “allay activity,” but I’ve never heard the word used in that function.

But it is beautifully and spiritually applied when it allows us to confront and overcome the tragic trepidation that keeps us from achieving our fullness.

Allay my fears.

Matter of fact, I don’t know how far from the truth I would be if I said that fear is at the root of all the iniquity that profoundly cripples our efforts.

So having things that allay our fears may be the definition of a gift from God. How can we allay our fears?

1. By allowing ourselves to believe that the world is not really out to get us. The world is too busy with itself to have much concern over our affairs.

2. By accepting the fact that worry is not only useless, but it is a time drainer. It extorts from us the energy and talent we might have used to address our conflict.

3. And finally, that mysteriously but faithfully, life offers dilemma, which normally seems to have a briefer life expectancy than we prepare for.

Flatly, problems are lazier than we think they are. They depart more quickly than they threaten, stalking off to trouble someone else.

I was grateful for this word today. It lets me know what my job is as a human being–to allay fears … starting with my own.


Africa

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

 

Africa: the second-largest continent, a southward projection of the Old World land mass divided roughly in half by the equator and surrounded by sea except where the Isthmus of Suez joins it to Asia.

I am shocked.

I sat down to write a clever essay on today’s word, Africa. when I dug into my Middle-America, middle-class, middle-intelligent and middle-conscience mind,  all I was able to conjure were images which I must be honest and tell you, seem quite racist.

Because when I think of Africa, I think of missionaries, cannibals, lions, monkeys, tribal rituals, Apartheid, jungles, Serengeti, antelopes being chased and killed, and people with black skin talking with extremely articulate British accents.

I thought about trying to come up with something different, pretending that I am cultured and aware of modern Africa and the progress the people have made. Or tip my hat to the notion that Africa is the “mother land of the whole human race,” but I realized it would be phony, and I would just be another American trying to appear that I am free of prejudice, when the truth is that, contrary to that fact, the continent reminds me of Tarzan and Jane.

I do not think we become better people by hiding our iniquity.

I do not think that I can fool you into believing I am a cosmopolitan world traveler who is free of my Central Ohio upbringing, and still walk away with a pure soul.

Here’s what I WILL say about Africa: most of what I learned as a child about this magnificent continent had something to do with either the zoo or the Zulu.

No one took the time to teach me anything else.

So even though I am grown and people insist that I’m set in my ways, I am unsettled enough to accept this meager representation of a great history and people. So I apologize for my lacking by trying to increase. Now that I have been alerted to my limitation, I will attempt to expand my borders.

We will never know what Africa could truly be today because it was invaded, attacked and robbed of its citizenry by white people who thought they were better.

I am an ancestor of such folk. For this I apologize.

But the best way I can express my contrition is by continuing to learn instead of assume.

 

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.

Absolute

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Absolute: (adj.) not qualified or diminished in any way: total absolute secrecy  2. a value or principle that is regarded as universally valid or that may be viewed without relation to other things: good and evil are presented as absolutes

Absolutely valid. Wow.

I was just sitting here thinking about how in my lifetime, I was instructed in a whole bunch of absolutes which ended up being absolutely ridiculous.

As a boy I was told that black people and white people shouldn’t mix because God had ordained the more pale parts of His creation to be enlightened and the darker ones to be servants. Yes, I was tutored in how the Creative Heavenly Father color-coded His human family to make it clear how they should be categorized.

  • This was an absolute. It was wrong.

I was told by my parents and church that rock and roll was “of the devil” and no good could ever come of it because the beat of the music was purposefully coordinated to the heartbeat of the human being so as to stimulate our juices, to make us act like the natives in Africa, who ran around naked, committing all sorts of sins of the flesh. I was a good white boy from Ohio. I didn’t want to turn into a pigmy or a cannibal. So at first I avoided the demon rock and roll–that is, until I sat down and really listened to it and realized that it energized not only my physical heart, but touched my teenage searching one as well.

  • They were absolutely sure that rock and roll was evil. They were wrong.

I was told that divorce was a sin and anyone who committed it and remarried was in danger of hell because they would be committing adultery. Matter of fact, I saw many ministers and politicians who had to abandon their occupations so as to purge themselves of their sinfulness due to the separation from a spouse. But enough politicians and preachers broke the bonds of marriage that eventually a new doctrine had to be brought forth to give retroactive forgiveness for “splitting the sheets”–and now nearly all the churches in America have a ministry geared to those who are no longer matrimonially entwined.

  • This was an absolute–until it wasn’t.

So to be candid,  I’m a little fuzzy on the concept of “absolutes.” I hear people scream them at the top of their lungs today–many of them the offspring of the former “anti-mixing-of-the-races, rock-and-roll-is-hellish and divorce-is-iniquity” crowd.

I think I have come up with a simple conclusion: the only absolutes we know for sure are that we are all human, we should never judge and Mother Nature and God are much better deciders of what will continue to evolve and what the planet doesn’t need.

Yes–I guess I’m absolutely human.  That is the absolute I am comfortable in donning.

Aboveboard

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Aboveboard: (adj.) legitimate, honest and open: certain transactions were not totally aboveboard.

Some things are not your business. But more things ARE your business than I sometimes think should be.

That’s the truth.

The easiest way to get in trouble as a human being is to walk around with a chip on your shoulder, proclaiming it’s YOUR life and nobody else has any right to interfere. The more you insist that people have no right to question you, the more questions will be sent your way.

You are much more likely to be audited by the IRS if you complain about paying taxes than if you just pay your fair share and move on to the rest of your life.

You are much less likely to be looked on suspiciously concerning your particular sexual practices if you don’t wave a flag and object to scrutiny.

People are funny in the sense that all of us want to keep SOME secrets, but we’re very suspicious of anyone who’s secretive. You might consider this to be hypocrisy–if you didn’t realize that it’s just human.

I’ve got it figured that if you want to live an aboveboard life, you can probably keep about five things secret–as long as you thrust to the forefront twenty admissions that make you forthcoming and honest. The minute someone thinks that you are hiding something, they assume it’s the tip of an iceberg of iniquity.

It is a bad profile.

There are things that I do in my life, or things that I feel, that I would rather not share in public or with the viewers on Entertainment Tonight. It’s not that I’m exactly ashamed of them–just not quite certain of all of their origins, so I wouldn’t be able to totally explain my inclinations.

But rather than spouting off my particular need for reclusion and autonomy from the rest of the human race, I would much rather be aboveboard on fifty other things about my life that don’t really make any difference whatsoever–and leave the general populace to believe I am transparent.

  • So I will gladly tell you I’m fat. First of all, it’s faily obvious. I lose nothing in that revelation.
  • I will tell you that I do not have a college degree. At my age, no one really cares.
  • I will tell you that my legs don’t work as well as I would like them to. I have other talents to keep me mobile.
  • I can admit that I do not like jalapeno peppers and still be in favor of immigration reform.

There are so many things that we can present, be candid about and aboveboard that we don’t need to act defensive and careful around one another.

So would I mind if you found out my five little private areas? No. I mean, I’ve never slaughtered chickens for the Kentucky Colonel. It’s just that they aren’t the brightest bulbs in my stage lighting. And I would much rather draw your attention to other areas of my weakness, and in the process present myself as adorable instead of unapproachable.

It is good to live an aboveboard life. Otherwise, you’ll have everybody grabbing a flashlight–and checking below your decks.