Laughter is good. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones” (Proverbs 7:22 KJV). It seems that a merry attitude starts in the soul and leaks into the body. Every pharmaceutical medicine I have tasted ranged from barely tolerable to downright nasty, but laughter feels good and has no ugly side effects. No, I am not suggesting that you dump your meds for a DVD series of I Love Lucy. To medicate or not to medicate is in your court.
Did Jesus laugh? How about Moses or David? I think we can be big enough in our theological mindset to say yes. Okay, the Bible is serious stuff about the serious side of life—and death—and beyond, but there are stories about real people and real people can be really funny. It maybe not side-splitting funny, meaning funny as in “ha, ha,” not funny-peculiar. Well, they can be peculiar too. At the very least, they warrant an occasional guffaw or chortle. It is pretty peculiar when a woman talks to a serpent and a jackass prophesies. Some things are just plain funny.
Let’s face it, making light of serious faults and failures can be uncomfortable and funny all at the same time. Fear not, friend. Human foibles are the stuff of comedy since Adam and Eve evacuated the Garden. The Bible is rife with story after story of people who made a few great decisions, but notably made some really bad ones, the stuff of comedy that would have ended up on the ancient version of Saturday Night Live. It pretty much makes our dumb decisions fall into the categories of “I-guess-I’m-not-the-only-one” or “how-could-______(fill in the blank)-have-been-so-stupid!” Imagine having your moments of idiocy retold to the whole world for generations. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.
More important, taking a close look at other people’s blunders is not so much that it sooths egos, but they can actually help us to learn from their mistakes, which is the point of failure stories. What do we do with those dumb things we say and do? We can squall and spit over them. We can promise the moon, sun, stars, and every living thing that it will NEVER happen again, only to repeat them at moments of utter weakness. Or we can shake our heads at our foolishness, squeak out a chuckle, and make some changes through the grace and love of God. I like change, especially when it ends in transformation. And somewhere in there is a story to laugh about.
Copyright 2015 by Eva Benevento. All rights reserved.