Capacity to Laugh

We need to have large enough minds to hold seriousness, obligation, and responsibility in tension with enjoyment, laughter, and fun. The overly serious could blow me out of the water with a few choice quotes: Take up your cross daily. Be vigilant always. Be careful because your enemy the devil prowls around, looking for ways to tempt and destroy you.

These precious truths call for life-changing decisions. But they are not the only things that Jesus lived and said. Easter Sunday follows Good Friday. Jesus told his disciples to go away and get some rest. He provided wine for a wedding party - in a sufficiently emphatic fashion that we can assume Jesus wouldn't necessarily consider a sugary wedding punch "holier" than wine. He said that friends of the groom should celebrate and party while they still have the groom with them. Jesus heard himself called a glutton and a drunkard.

Fasting, experiencing conviction, dying to our own desires - these bedrock truths are not the only truths. God created us with the capacity to cry and also with the capacity to laugh. I want to worship him while doing both.

I love G. K. Chesterton's take on this: "I do not know why touching the heart should always be connected only with the idea of touching it to compassion or a sense of distress. The heart can be touched to joy and triumph; the heart can be touched to amusement."

-Gary Thomas, Pure Pleasure