$130 per person (3/1/2010-4/11/2010)

If you have any questions please contact Janelle Bojonell at 248-879-8533 x167 or e-mail Janelle Bojonell.
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Then it happened.  An elderly lady came and sat down in the third seat to my left next to the CNN monitor.  I paid little attention to her until she started laughing.  She was reading the “comics” section of the Sunday paper and every few seconds broke out into a contagious laughter.  She was oblivious to me, the news and everything else.  I smiled as I reflected back to my boyhood days when the “comics” (the funnies) section was the first and only part of the paper I would read.  I don’t know if life got too busy or too complicated, but I have not read the “comics” for almost fifty years.

Each January as I make up my goals for the New Year, “to laugh more” has never been on my list.  How about you?  But, I have come to the conclusion that I need to laugh more.  Perhaps we all do.  God has given us the gift of laughter for many reasons.  The writers of Proverbs say, “A joyful heart is good medicine” (17:22).  Researchers have discovered that laughter is good for both the mind and the body in reducing stress and optimizing immunity.  Laughter can break the tension in a marriage argument or cut the ice in tense situations.

My grandchildren with their simple, uncluttered lives find it easy to laugh.  They do not need much of a reason to giggle or laugh.  I laugh when they laugh.

Several times a year, thousands of people pack the Troy campus worship center for Comedy for a Cause, an event sponsored by Promise Village providing comedians to help us laugh at ourselves and life.  People are lined up to get into the building, while in all my years of ministry people have never lined up to hear me preach. Many people realize the value of laughter and their need to do it.   And yet, there are opportunities in our lives everyday to laugh.

There have been many times when I read the Bible that I smile and sometimes laugh out loud.  The real life stories of Scripture are filled with humorous incidents.  Abraham and Sarah passed on naming their son “Bob,” “John” or Harry,” but rather choose “Isaac” which means “he laughs.”  When you have a child at age 90 and 100 you had better be able to laugh.

I laugh when I read the story in Acts 20 where the Apostle Paul “prolonged in his speech until midnight.  A man sitting at the window sank into a deep sleep as Paul talks still longer.”  He fell out of a third story window and died.  Paul, the man who put the young man to sleep now raised him from the dead.  The inclusion of that story in the Holy Scriptures speaks of the power of the apostles to do the miraculous and at the same time includes the details with which I can identify – the apostle also put him to sleep which ultimately caused the death.  The Holy Spirit could have just told us that the dead were raised, but He perhaps wanted to give hope to 21^st Century pastors that even an apostle can put people to sleep.

Jesus would often speak in word pictures that had to make his readers smile as they saw the picture, “You blind guides straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.”

Life is sometimes so serious that we do not need reminders to be sober.  We must, however, look for the opportunities to laugh.  Perhaps this Sunday I will buy the newspaper and just read the “comics.”