You can listen to this week’s Devotional here
Author: Carolyn Gard
“a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance . . .” Ecclesiastes 3:4
A look at the headlines can plunge us into major depression. Listening to some fire and brimstone preachers makes us realize that no matter what we do, we’re going to Hell. God must look down on the world and wonder what happened. We can easily despair, but before we get too down, let’s lighten up. Even God may have a sense of humor. Take a look at the Bible.
God let Adam and Eve name the animals. I can just see God smiling, watching them try to come up with a name for a freak of evolution, what we now call the Duck Billed Platypus. God played a joke on Noah – “Hey, Noah, see if you can fit two of all the 1,877,920 species into a 510-foot-long boat.” And
watching the walls of Jericho fall, “I told you what would happen if you went with the lowest bidder.”
The New Testament doesn’t have quite so much humor. Maybe Jesus had some doubts about walking on water. “What if it doesn’t work? What excuse can I make? Oh, yes, I’ll tell them I was training for the swimming part of the triathlon.”
What’s the point of lightening up in the midst of despair? Well, if we don’t relax a little we’ll never get out of bed. There are many problems in the world today: poverty, homelessness, immigration, wars, and climate change to name a few. What are we trying to do when we tackle these problems? We’re trying to bring about a change in people’s lives for the better. We’re trying to enable them to enjoy life, to get them to the point where they can laugh. And that’s where lightening up comes in.
By lightening up we aren’t trying to downplay anyone’s hardship. We are, however, trying to look ahead to the future, to think about the world that we are trying to create. A world with no poverty, no homelessness, no need for immigration for a better life, no wars, no world falling apart as the climate changes. A world in which life is good enough that we can laugh. A world in which we can’t get enough videos of cute babies and cute kittens.
God, let us know that a little humor is one of the reasons that we can keep on going in a world of despair.