The Gift of Laughter

One of the things I love most about the people with whom I work at TriState Habitat for Humanity is that they love to laugh. While we take our work very seriously, we do not take ourselves too seriously. We laugh at the silliness of the situations we find ourselves in. We laugh at the absurdity of construction code requirements and grant application documentation. We laugh at the strange things we sometimes find ourselves doing like making weird Christmas videos for our website or trying to decipher "interesting" handwriting on an application for home ownership.
Today I found myself laughing a whole bunch. We were in the midst of trying to solve a problem that called for input from three different areas. We each had our say from our perspectives and then were trying diligently to work the problem. None of this seems funny on the surface, but if you get different people with different backgrounds and different ways of communicating together, there's bound to be miscommunication, confusion, and a few sarcastic comments thrown in for good measure.
Well, as they often do, one thing led to another and we found ourselves in stitches over what should have been a very simple discussion. We almost couldn't stop laughing. I was in tears from laughing so hard at one point. Some of my co-workers on the other side of the hallway heard us laughing and thought we were having some kind of very loud party without them.
I continue to believe that it is my sense of humor that keeps me grounded in life. Sometimes you just have to laugh at the craziness that is life. Sometimes all you can do is laugh because if you didn't laugh you would cry. Laughter for me reminds me that I am alive and brings a sense of hope to situations that threaten to overwhelm me.
So, tonight I'm giving God thanks for the gift of laughter. I am also thanking God for the privilege of serving on a team that loves to laugh. I think that most of the time they are laughing with me but I also know that there are probably times when they are laughing at me. They don't do this out of any sense of malice but because I tend to find myself in laughable situations and they join me in recognizing the silliness of it all. Also, I'm just plain weird and that is definitely cause for laughter.
Thanks for being a part of my journey!