Have you ever noticed how a person can laugh and it makes you want to join in the fun?  You can just overhear people laughing and it makes you smile.  But if it continues, you will find yourself laughing along, even if you don’t know why they are laughing?  That’s the power of laughter.

I have witnessed on video, and real life how just one person laughing alone in close proximity to other people will eventually have everyone laughing even though none of them know what it is about.  Maybe we could start to do this randomly once in awhile.  I think I may try it with a friend sometime.  And then if it works, I could do it alone and feel more confident.  It takes guts to do this on purpose.

And what a difference it makes in you when you can laugh instead of being down in the dumps.  But it can be tricky, because sometimes we want to hold on to the bad feelings.  I don’t know why we do this, but I have been there before.

I remember one time, after having foot surgery, I stayed at my mom’s house and used her hospital bed to keep my leg up and get around better because her house is one-story, with no steps to deal with.  We were in the same room and I was already asleep.  My mom started laughing in the middle of the night and I woke up.  She was laughing so hard that I started laughing too.  We just keep laughing harder and harder and I kept trying to ask her why we were laughing.

She couldn’t stop laughing enough to tell me why, and so we just kept on laughing until it started to hurt.  Finally, she calmed down and was able to tell me why she was laughing, and we laughed some more.  She had been in her recliner and hadn’t been able to fall asleep when she had thought about something funny that had happened in the past, and it just brought back the funny memory.  Since I was there, it made me laugh too, because I couldn’t help myself.  I just got pulled into the hilarity.

This has happened to me many times.  I am really susceptible to this phenomenon and I am so happy about this, and thankful.  Even in the midst of sorrow, the sound of laughter can make one feel better. I think that laughter is one of the many gifts that God gives us.  It is an antidote to a bad mood and it raises our quality of life by its very existence.

I think that I will try a “laughing in public” experiment soon.  It will be worth a laugh to me even though I am apprehensive about whether or not it I will pull it off, because there’s a very good chance that it will.