Pastor's Page

Humor is infectious.  The sound of roaring laughter is far more contagious than any cough, sniffle, or sneeze.  When laughter is shared, it binds people together and increases happiness and intimacy.  A church’s morale can be measured by the amount of joy present when we come together and laugh.

Laughter also triggers healthy physical changes in the body.  Humor and laughter strengthen your immune system, boost your energy, diminish pain, and protect you from the damaging effects of stress.  Best of all, this priceless medicine is fun, free, and easy to obtain.

“Your sense of humor is one of the most powerful tools you have to make certain that your daily mood and emotional state support good health.”

With so much power to heal and renew, the ability to laugh easily and frequently is a tremendous resource for surmounting problems, enhancing your relationships, and supporting both physical and emotional health.

The social benefits of humor and laughter

Humor and playful communication strengthen our relationships by triggering positive feelings and fostering emotional connection.  When we laugh with one another, a positive bond is created.  This bond acts as a strong buffer against stress, disagreements, and disappointment.  Laughing with others is more powerful than laughing alone.

Shared laughter is one of the most effective tools for keeping relationships fresh and exciting.  All emotional sharing builds strong and lasting relationship bonds, but sharing laughter and play also adds joy, vitality, and resilience, and humor is a powerful and effective way to heal resentments, disagreements, and hurts. Laughter unites people during difficult times.

Incorporating more humor and play into your daily interactions can improve the quality of your love relationships, as well as your connections with co-workers, family members, and friends.  Using humor and laughter in relationships allows you to:

• Be more spontaneous.  Humor gets you out of your head and away from your troubles.
• Let go of defensiveness.  Laughter helps you forget judgments, criticisms, and doubts.
• Release inhibitions.  Your fear of holding back and holding on are set aside.
• Express your true feelings.  Deeply felt emotions are allowed to rise to the surface.

Laughter is your birthright, a natural part of life that is innate and inborn.  Infants begin smiling during the first weeks of life and laugh out loud within months of being born.  Even if you did not grow up in a household where laughter was a common sound, you can learn to laugh at any stage of life.

Begin by setting aside special times to seek out humor and laughter, as you might with working out, and build from there.  Eventually, you’ll want to incorporate humor and laughter into the fabric of your life, finding it naturally in everything you do.

One essential characteristic that helps us laugh is not taking ourselves too seriously.  We’ve all known the classic tight-jawed sourpuss who takes everything with deathly seriousness and never laughs at anything.  No fun there!

Some events are clearly sad and not occasions for laughter, but most events in life don’t carry an overwhelming sense of either sadness or delight.  They fall into the gray zone of ordinary life, giving you the choice to laugh or not.

Go ahead…laugh!

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, But a broken spirit saps a person’s strength.” Proverbs 17:22 NLT