God broke the mold when he made [laughter]

Laughing…the greatness of it! What an amazing gift to be able to laugh. It’s my impression that we’ve all got a little too serious these days. Maybe we’ve been made that way by our society or maybe it has become our choice to reject laughter altogether and replace it with sullen and broken faces. I simply cannot be serious all the time; it’s just not healthy. Whether it’s just making up stupid jokes with my significant other or catching a rare-to-find comedy that has both humor and some decency, laughter seems to provide the release needed from the anxieties and stresses that life can often bring. We’ve even gone so far in the church with our seriousness that we expect our savior to also be such as we are, i.e., sullen and broken. The images and paintings of the Lord almost always seem somewhat distant and reserved.  But I can imagine the Lord of LIFE as one who toyed with the Twelve; or as the Passion of the Christ so well portrayed in one of its scenes: as, just for the fun of it, doing something as simple and childlike as splashing water into the face of his mother. I’m sure the creator of laughter realized while on this earth, as he must certainly realize now, the importance of laughter in helping us along in our journey through life. Perhaps the church that is emerging should focus on creatively re-imagining the laughing Christ: I think it would help us all to refocus our lenses when envisioning what the savior must be like–maybe the best place to find him right now is in the smile that forms on the faces of those we love, because for whatever reason, they chose to break societies’ “molded broken face” by laughing!