Choosing To Laugh Rather Than Cry
Recently I was asked to speak at a ladies event at our church. After doing a whole, “who, me??? are you sure?”, and a month of struggle-bus writing (and rewriting) this is the talk I gave. I’m only posting it here because of the many requests that I’ve gotten for a copy of it. It’s so much easier to just put it in one place. Keep in mind, this is a million pages long (it was a 20 minute talk)…so read at your own risk. Oh, and the theme was movies… specifically comedies! So that’s where all of those references came from….
Choosing To Laugh Rather Than Cry
1. Life as a Comedy
Growing up, my parents kept their TV in a closet on a little cart with wheels. Every week when Friday night came, that cart would get wheeled out and we would have family movie night. So many wonderful memories were made as a family huddled around that tiny TV. After a week of busyness and stresses, we would come together to fall deeply into a story, and more often than not, laugh. (Except for that one horrible, horrible night when my mom accidently thought that The Ring was a comedy…turns out someone had mis-shelved the horror films that day. Heads up, do not watch that movie unless you love nightmares.)
Through these Friday nights, I learned the magic of leaving your stresses at the door and just simply, laughing. When I think of movies that have made me laugh out loud, I think of perhaps Meet The Parents, Elf, The Incredibles, Moms Night Out, The Proposal, Father of The Bride, This Means War, Despicable Me, Princess Bride, Toy Story 4, or a more subtle humor like Ocean’s Eleven or Mr. and Mrs. Smith. So many well done films out there by laugh professionals.
I will admit though, these days I don’t have as much time to watch an entire movie, so I tend to gravitate to a short TV show, as twenty-thirty minutes is all I can commit to sitting down and relaxing most days. Like the TV sitcom, Friends. I think I can quote most lines in most seasons. And even hearing them for the hundredth time, I still laugh all over again.
I’ve seen life come a bit full circle though because over the last ten years, I’ve had five babies, who are all quickly growing up into little people who love Friday night movie nights of their own. A couple weeks ago they saw the new Aladdin which they loved! And I will never forget the date with my son Carter to the theater to see The Greatest Showman. His eyes got as big as saucers as it was his first time to the theater—all of the dancing and singing and flashy circus numbers. To this day he mentions that as one of his favorite date memories.
But, in addition to the fun family movie nights, adding five babies has added to my life a lot of….let’s call it “mess”. And all of this life mess has taught me a new side of pushing aside stress and simply laughing. More days than not, this mess get tangled upon mess, and it comes to a point where honestly it just gets kind of ridiculous.
As a result, daily I’m faced with my own stories that demand a response. Is this day going to go in the movie category Drama? Perhaps horror? Or comedy?
More simply put…do I laugh or cry?
For example, there was that time my two boys shimmied up the fridge and stole an entire, Costco-sized box of fiber bars stored up top. They promptly ate the ginormous box of bars, and then I discovered them in the driveway with their pants around their ankles, bare bums flashing the world, creating a poop lava situation all over my driveway. Apparently all that fiber hit all at once and they simply could not make it inside. Oh, and they were still eating the bars…while pooping. Because they were just so good!!!
Have kids….they said. It will be FUN…they said…
Or the fact that my gorgeous nine-year-old daughter Addison, who has Down syndrome, struggles with her speech but LOVES music. To the point where she gets super obsessed with one song at a time. She spends most of her days begging to hear this one song over and over and again. It used to be Shake It Off. Such a sweet song. But then…it was Uptown Funk. Except….she couldn’t say the “n” in Funk. So my precious, beautiful, wonderful, sweet little girl spent her entire days at home and at school for about three weeks, requesting over and over again “The Funk Song”…without the “n”. Have mercy.
Or that time when I was on bed rest for my first pregnancy and I was told by my doctor to relax and bring my blood pressure down. So I did what any person would do with free time on a cool day in November told to just relax, I started a fire in the fireplace with plans to just chill on the couch in front of it. Except, the fireplace damper was closed when I thought it was open and I wasn’t up enough on my fireplace knowledge to realize this, so instead of a relaxing chill time I ended up filling the house with billowing clouds of aggressive black smoke from one of those fake logs. One thing led to another until there I was, very pregnant and sobbing, on my front lawn while ten fire trucks and dozens of ambulances and the entire city’s worth of police cars stopped the busy traffic in front of my house to come….open my damper. Traffic was backed up as far as I could see, watching me, IN MY PAJAMAS melting down on my front lawn. Operation: Bring Blood Pressure Down….going really well.
Fun fact, did you know that once billowing smoke fills your house, it leaves behind lots of black spider webs that you didn’t know existed? And oh yes, did I mention, we had a houseguest!!!! Deanna’s hotel, kind of smoky, three stars, would not recommend.
(btw, with that story in mind, God choose to give that girl FIVE KIDS to keep alive. I am convinced that God has quite the sense of humor himself.)
Or, fast forward to a few years ago, to the day that my husband put the toilet seat in my dishwasher. To quote “get it really clean”. And not only was he super pleased about this, but he expected me to praise him for his awesome ingenuity. For putting a super dirty toilet seat….in my brand new dishwasher. On one hand, it was SO NICE of him to step up and try to help with the housekeeping. On the other hand….my dishwasher…it saw some things that day. It saw some…really bad things. Before I knew it my dishwasher was lying on a couch telling its therapist all about its horror movie of a day. That poor, poor thing. My husband, a chemistry undergrad who saw much worse things be sanitized with heat, still swears to this day that this was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. I….well, nope nope nope. In sickness and in health, in new dishwasher purchases and in the quick, toilet-seat death of that same dishwasher….isn’t marriage just so fun?
2. Laughter Analyzed
The question is, how do we take these traumatizing stories, turn them upside down, and choose to laugh? Because piously saying that we should choose to laugh rather than cry is all well and good, but HOW do we do this?
What I have learned, through a LOT of trial and error, is that, in order to laugh at the messes life throws your way, you need to find some objective perspective.
Sometimes this takes time. The Fiber One story took me 7 months before I could laugh at the magnitude of that disgusting life mess. But other times all it takes is the time it takes to retell the story.
Whatever it takes to just own it. Okay, well, THAT happened. And it’s okay. And kind of ridiculous. And what are the chances?
Then, as much as you can, take a step back. De-personalize it. Objectify the entire situation. You aren’t IN it, all tangled up in the emotions and HARD HARD feelings and mess. No, you’re ten steps away looking in at your situation as if it’s SOMEONE ELSE’S problem.
I mean, when you think about it, that’s all that comedy really is. TV shows or movies…Something horrible happens to someone really likeable. And then it gets worse. And then it gets worse and worse. And just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, the bottom drops out of everything. And through craftily written dialogue and professional “surprised” facial expressions, it’s all quite hysterical. Because you know that in the end…it’s all going to be okay. The comedy genre gives us the safety of assuming a good ending. So it’s the bad, the outrageous, the WOW, the ridiculous that makes us smile. Why? Because it’s happening to someone else.
Take I Love Lucy, the beloved TV show. Which episode is super hilarious because everything is going right and dandy and she is very successful at everything she tries the first time? Nope. That entire show concept is built off of her failure to enter show business like her husband. Or, anyone remember the chocolate factory episode where the conveyor belt full of chocolates is moving too fast and she can’t wrap them fast enough so she ends up filling her cheeks and stuffing them down her shirt….aaaand she gets fired.
Comedies make us laugh by making light of hard things in an exaggerated way. And this is so successful that millions and millions of dollars are made each year in the laughter industry.
But to take an actual event in your life and attempt to laugh at it…this sounds like a lot of work. Why not just write it off as a horrible experience and move on to the next one?
· There are actual health benefits for choosing to turn to laughter instead of staying in the stress of the hard moment.
The Midwest hospital Mayo Clinic says:
“Laughter enhances your intake of oxygen-rich air,
stimulates your heart, lungs and muscles,
and increases the endorphins that are released by your brain.
“A rollicking laugh fires up and then cools down your stress response,
and it can increase and then decrease your heart rate and blood pressure.
And in the long term? They say frequent laughter can
Improve your Immune System
Relieve pain
Improve your mood, combat depression
Lower your blood pressure
· Not only does it prove beneficial to our bodies, the Bible actually tells us over and over to find and choose joy.
Proverbs 17:22 A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
Psalms 126:2 Then was our mouths filled with laughter, our tongues with singing…
James 1:2 Count it all joy…
Psalm 118:24 This is the day that the Lord hath made, we will REJOICE and be glad in it.
We have all been gifted just so many days here on earth. Lucy Maude Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables, referred to these days as pearls.
“After all,” Anne had said to Marilla once, “I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”
And the truth is, within these simple little days, that might seem endless (and yet they’re not), we all have many, many choices. Whether to laugh or cry is just one small part of our lives.
3. Forgiveness, the root of perspective
When I discovered my driveway full of poop, and my two half-naked boys looking ever so guilty, I had a bigger choice to make. When I found my husband holding the super clean toilet seat next to the defiled dishwasher…I had a bigger choice to make.
Do I forgive them? Or do I get angry and hold this against them FOREVER.
And as I weighed this choice, turning it over in my mind, I couldn’t help but remember how I had been forgiven for so much worse.
My sin, my very best efforts to be good, they were all way worse than my dirty driveway. And the more I tried in and of myself to clean it up, the worse it got.
God looked down in His ultimate goodness and He loved me. He sent his son, Jesus, to die on the cross, to take all of my sins on Him. His son then rose from the grave, defeating death. Putting my faith and trust in Christ and this work on the cross, my sins are forgiven. My dirty, dirty driveway of life is scrubbed clean. I am given the promise of eternal life. Of heaven. Not because of my own doing, but because of His work. Because of the strength of his love.
And so just as I have been forgiven, I look at my sons, embarrassed and horrified at what they’ve done, but in that moment as I pray for help, I’m given the strength to forgive them. I look at my husband, trying his very, very best to help and honestly thinking he’s done a good thing, and I’m given strength to see his good intent and graciously forgive what he’s done to my dishwasher.
I think forgiveness might very well be the key to perspective on a situation. It’s hard to laugh at something that happened to you if you’re angry about it.
And if you hold onto the anger, just like laughter has benefits for your health, anger has been proven to be detrimental to your overall health.
A few weeks back while I was writing this talk, I had an incident that really tested me on this. It involved a well-laid afternoon plan going VERY awry, ending with my nine-year-old daughter Addison having a potty accident during her ballet class.
She had this accident while I was across town with Carter at his piano lesson. And then she took off all of her clothes and walked stark naked, back out into the waiting room full of parents. They’re all like,
“Excuse me, naked girl, where is your MOTHER?”
So the other ballet parents helped her find some dry clothes, cleaned up her mess, and then waited until the end of class to deliver her to me out in the van, where I was standing, like a schmuck, with a screaming baby and a van full of crying children. (I told you the day went awry.)
“It takes a village!” These parents said as they graciously explained to me what happened.
I wanted the parking lot to just open up and swallow me. I was mortified. Because not only was my child parading around naked in a very classy and formal ballet studio waiting room, I wasn’t there to help her when she needed it.
As I was trying to process this and all of the feelings crowding around me, this talk sprang to my mind. And I remembered what I had written about forgiveness.
But who was I supposed to forgive in this scenario? It isn’t Addison’s fault that she has Down syndrome and low muscle tone and more accidents than a typical 9-year-old.
I didn’t do anything wrong in this story. I don’t have time to detail out every minute of that afternoon, but honestly, this was a story of a mom doing everything in her power to do a good job for all of her children. When a random accident happened, very very kind people were right there who jumped in and were so happy to help. Addison was taken care of in her moment of need.
It does take a village. And sometimes I think God lets things like this happen just to remind us that we cannot do all the things alone.
The forgiveness for me in that moment came down to my own feelings of guilt. My wounded pride. My sense of wanting to control the moment. All of this was covered for me on the cross. His forgiveness is enough to cover even my most embarrassing, weakest moment.
He put kind people in her path to help her, and he gave me his strength to let go of the guilt and carry on. And the ability to find myself laughing just a little bit as I relayed the naked streaking bit to my husband.
So Forgive. Find Perspective. Laugh liberally. Laugh often and a lot. It’s good for you!
But even more importantly, remember that you don’t have to do any of this alone. This life, these stepping stone days, these moments slipping away like pearls on a string—these are more often than not hard. Laughter can get us some superficial, human body relief. But forgiveness, for others and yourself…that prepares us for something so much greater.
4. But What About When It’s Not Funny At All
Because while movie comedies guarantee a good ending, in life, this isn’t always the case. But even as things get impossibly hard, we have a greater peace and strength carrying us through.
John 16:33 “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation but take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Matthew 5:4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Psalm 23:4 “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
Sometimes life throws stuff at us that’s just hysterical, sometimes it’s funny with a little bit of perspective work, sometimes it’s barely funny, and sometimes…sometimes it is just dark all the way around.
When I think back on my own experiences of dark times, I think about the moment that I found out that my baby was going to be born with Down syndrome. In that moment God stripped away every expectation I had about what parenting would look like--what my life would look like--and He put me in a situation where I had no choice but to trust Him. In my initial response to this, He revealed a lot of pride in my heart and an unwillingness to rely on His plan as better than my own.
He highlighted countless areas of sin in my heart that required confessing, and then He taught me all about sacrificial love and how to be a special needs mom. Because I’m such a special person? No. Because I haven’t had to do one single second of any of this in my own strength.
When I first got her diagnosis, I felt God had made a mistake. This was too dark. Too hard.
“Trust me,” He said. “I’ve got this. I’ve got you. And I’ve got your daughter. You can trust me. This is good.”
Oh I struggled. Oh boy did I. I felt like He hadn’t answered my prayer. I had pleaded, BEGGED with Him that those tests be wrong. I sobbed every night for five months as I prayed. Please, please, please.
And yet, as she was born, it only took a couple of seconds for her slanted almond eyes and extremely low muscle tone to be revealed.
Down syndrome.
I had begged and pleaded and yet He said, “No. This is the path that I’ve chosen for you.”
And then she was whisked off to the NICU to determine why she immediately turned a bright shade of blueberry. Thus started a round of surgeries and a long NICU stay and finally, after five weeks, I brought my baby home on full time oxygen and a gtube.
It was like motherhood shock therapy. “Welcome to motherhood!!! BTW, you will also need a full time nursing degree and the knowledge of twelve therapists and gooood luck handing your brand new baby over to that heart surgeon…TWICE!”
But you know what the last ten years have given me? Some objective perspective.
And you know what I’ve realized? Through many many days slipping by like pearls on a string as a special needs mom…
He was right. He IS right. The trust and strength and peace that I’ve gained through all of this has been instrumental in such a season of growth for me. He DID answer my prayer. Just with a better outcome than the one I could even begin to envision.
Being a special needs mom….this is good. This is God’s kindness to me in so many ways. Is it always easy? No. But there is such beauty to be mined even from hardness.
The gorgeous almost-ten year old named Addison who makes me smile every day…that’s just my icing on the cake. (Chocolate icing…her favorite!)
And so as I stand before you, I can say with confidence that no matter how much we choose to view our lives as a comedy for the sake of making it through, at the end of the day there is a certain level of hard to life that can only be comforted by one thing: knowing Christ. Experiencing the sacrificial work of Jesus on the cross. The strength of the Lord, graciously provided for our every need. The peace provided by God’s love for us.
After all, He created laughter. He created joy. He created this complex thing called life, and the ability to find perspective in tricky situations.
As I go about my days with my precious family built so perfectly just for me by an extremely kind and gracious heavenly Father, I am grateful for the ability to laugh as I navigate lots of life mess. And I am so immensely thankful for a full couch as we live it up, one family movie night at a time.