LIGHTEN UP!

"Unless you...become like children."
Matthew 18:3 NAS

How's your sense of humor these days? Jesus said, "Unless you...become like children, you will not enter the kingdom." Anne Klein, an expert on healing through humor, reminds us that children laugh about four hundred times a day and adults just fifteen. And you pay a price for it! Your spirit breaks, you lose your vitality and shrivel up emotionally. Laughter has an immediate effect on your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, muscle and brain activity. It influences how your body handles disease by activating your immune system. The Bible says: "A relaxed attitude lengthens...life" (Pr 14:30 TLB). "A joyful heart makes a [happy] face" (Pr 15:13 NAS). "For the happy...life is a continual feast" (Pr 15:15 NLT). "A cheerful heart is good medicine...a broken spirit saps a person's strength" (Pr 17:22 NLT). If a pill could do all that for you, wouldn't you take it? Life should be enjoyed, not endured!

Chuck Swindoll says, "Laughter is a God-given escape hatch...a safety valve...to lack a sense of humor is a serious deficiency." He points out that a healthy sense of humor is defined by the ability to laugh at your own mistakes, to accept justified criticism and get over it, to interject (or at least enjoy) wholesome humor in the middle of tense situations, and control statements that would be unfit, even though they may be funny. Theologian Helmut Thielecke wrote: "Lines of laughter about the eyes are just as much marks of faith as lines of care and seriousness. The church is in a bad way when it banishes laughter and leaves it to the cabaret, the nightclub and the toastmasters."