Laughter ... God's Gift to Me.

I found myself laughing yesterday. The kind of laughter that comes from the soul ... happy laughter, the type you don't think about first, it just happens. It wasn't a courtesy laugh, it was a great big belly laugh. It happened several times yesterday. And it startled me each time.

The first time it happened was around 9:20 AM. The worship team at church were gathered in the prayer room getting ready to commit our service to the Lord. As we all settled in, Pastor Brad took a Bible that the keyboardist was holding from her hands, asking what she was reading. He opened it and was amazed to find his Grandfather's name in it. It wasn't his Grandpa's "personal Bible", there were no notes or anything in it, but nonetheless he was startled to realize that it belonged to his family and his face reflected that. Everyone in the room laughed with him.

The second time it happened was in the afternoon when my smallest cat took the twine off the newspaper and started flipping it around and, then, after a ballet-like performance that should've been on the finest stage, hauled butt with it down the hallway.

The third time it happened was when I put a cooling pad (shaped to put around your neck, rather like those neck pillows you see) around my head to help my headache. I looked up at my wonderful Tony and said "kiss me". He started laughing at me and said "No way. You look like a toilet seat with that thing on your head, I'm not kissing a toilet seat!" (Of course, after we stopped laughing, he did give me a kiss ... "toilet seat" and all.)

Simple and innocent things, really. The best kind of joy. And I thank God for those opportunities to laugh from my heart. Just as the heavens, earth, sea, fields and trees rejoice and praise the Lord, so do I.

Psalm 96
¹¹Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof.
¹²Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice