Man, My Sides Hurt

I’m not sure what to make of all of this. I was looking at Elie (our 2-year-old daughter) the other day. I smiled. She smiled back. I got to thinking about smiling. What a strange way to contort the face, and yet there’s something so inviting and attractive about a smile. It’s the shape our mouths make when we laugh – when we really, naturally, spontaneously laugh. I have in my wallet our family photo from our pictorial directory and the photographer told Lori and I to just smile and wait for the moment that he would snap the picture – HIS concern was to get the girls to smile. So, Lori and I sat with these smiles pasted on our faces, he would act goofy, the girls would laugh and, voila, they’re SMILING. It’s a beautiful picture. I love it.


But smiling. What a weird thing to do. You’ve heard the “it takes more muscles to frown than to smile” or some such nonsense (here’s one take on the whole debate that might be worth a quick peek – http://www.snopes.com/science/smile.asp). Smiling just seems so natural. Laughing is so natural for children. Elie and Rachel laugh all the time. In fact, I got a statistic: (http://www.essentials.tv/site/c.bqLKI1OKKtF/b.864867/k.AF9B/
Volume_5_Number_3.htm factoid “laughter”).
The average child…
laughs 150 times per day

The average adult…
laughs 15 times per day
Source: Youth Worker Update
University of Michigan

I bet my girls tip the average most days. They have such joy in everyday things. We constantly hear laughter from their playtime (don’t get me wrong, we have our share of angry words between them, too, but those words are so quickly forgiven and forgotten, it amazes me). I bet I tip the average a lot of days, too. In fact, the people that I know well and that I LIKE being around tend to laugh a lot, too. Not AT each other (most of the time), but WITH each other. We pull our share of pranks on one another, but always good spirited (I have a big garbage can in my office right now labeled “dumpster” because the staff couldn’t get the real dumpster in the elevator – yeah, I gotta clean my office). I LOVE stuff like that. And the people who know me best know that. I HATE mean-spirited pranks that are pulled where someone is humiliated or where we “one-up” each other – no one likes to be laughed AT – but we all want to be laughed WITH.

• “A cheerful heart is good medicine…” Proverbs 17:22 (NRSV, NIV, AS)
• “A joyful heart is good medicine…” (NAS)
• “A merry heart does good, like medicine…” (NKJV)
• “A merry heart doeth good, like a medicine….” (KJV)
• “Being cheerful keeps you healthy…” (TEV)
• “A rejoicing heart doth good to the body…” (Young’s Literal Translation)
  

So, what’s the point of that? God seems to think that laughter and smiling are important. There’s something cathartic about laughing until your sides hurt. And I can’t help but wonder, if our faces are inclined toward smiling, if children spontaneously and reflexively laugh and smile, then laughter must be important to God. No, I don’t think there’s anything earth shattering in all of this – but I gotta make one observation. I don’t think we take this proverb to heart in the church. In the book Natural Church Development: A Guide to Eight Essential Qualities of Healthy Churches Christian Schwarz goes to great lengths to demonstrate that there are certain characteristics that healthy churches share in common (eight of them, in fact) and he uses adjectives to qualify the characteristics. For example, every church has spirituality. I mean, we’re churches after all, there MUST be something innately spiritual about at least some of what we do. His adjective to qualify our spirituality is Passionate Spirituality. In other words, “Yes, you’re a church, so you’re by default spiritual. The question is how passionate is that spirituality.” There’s a whole process that is used to assess these things and while Natural Church Development (NCD) is touted as a church growth tool, it is really a church health tool. Healthy churches share these essential qualities and move them toward health, just as all human bodies carry certain essential qualities that we can move toward health. For example, we all have cholesterol in our blood, but there are healthy levels and unhealthy levels – when they are at unhealthy levels, we take steps to move them toward healthy levels and when they are at healthy levels we keep watch so they don’t become unhealthy.

Anyway, this isn’t an ad for NCD (I’ll do that another time, I promise – I LOVE the program). One of the essential characteristics that churches share is loving relationships. Again, every church has relationships among people but the question is do we relate to one another in loving ways (and how much so). In thousands of surveys given to churches all over the world over the past decade or so, among healthy (or “high quality”) growing churches, 68% of people responded to the statement, “There is a lot of laughter in our church.” with either “true” or “very true.”
If a cheerful heart is good medicine for the body, then a cheerful heart ought to be good medicine for the body of Christ, as well. That’s not to suggest that we warm the congregation up with a stand up act before the worship service (hmmmm, though maybe…J ). And that’s not to suggest that if we lighten up, all our conflicts and power struggles and insecurities and whatever other baggage we bring to “church” will go away. But if we laugh together, if we laugh with one another, don’t you think that’ll help when we disagree and when we’re not sure what to do next, and don’t you think we’ll have a whole lot better relationship with one another so that when the time comes to cry together, we’ll already be arm in arm? I don’t know. Maybe I’m way too Pollyanna about things. Yep, I know I am. But I can still laugh about it. Can you?