Have a great laugh today. Great story included.
Laughing is an amazing gift from God. It helps you cope with sadness and everyday life. Have you ever felt mad and then someone said something to make you laugh? Even though you were upset, the laughter made your heart feel lighter and happier. The attitude of the heart has a direct impact on the physical well-being or lack thereof. If your heart is at peace, it gives life to the body. Your attitude, the way you approach the problems and trials of life, actually brings about good healing. That is amazing.
Our sense of peace comes under constant attack as the cares of this world threaten to drown out the “still small voice” of our Creator (1 Kings 19:12). Throughout Scripture, we’re urged not to be anxious or fearful, but rather to trust in God and His Word (Proverbs 3:5). In our own strength we can try to not feel anxious about the things that weigh heavy on our hearts, and we may actually feel a sense of peace for a time. But it will be fleeting, quickly fading as our circumstances change (John 14:27). God, however, promises to “keep in perfect peace all who trust in Him, all whose thoughts are fixed on Him. (Isaiah 26:3).
God is at work whether we see it or not, whether we feel it or not, whether we understand it or not, whether we believe it or not. So our attitude makes all the difference. You can have a cheerful spirit, if you believe there is a God in heaven who loves you, and who is at work in ways that you can’t see, believe or understand.
There is the story of Dr. Norman Cousins, who for a number of years was on the medical staff at the UCLA School of Medicine. About 25 years ago, Dr. Cousins was diagnosed with having a strange, rare kind of disease that destroys the connective tissue of the body. The doctors gave him a battery of expensive tests and said, “Sorry, there is really nothing we can do. It is degenerative and you are going to die.” Dr. Cousins said, “Well, I didn’t want to just give up.” So he set himself on a regimen of exercise, high doses of Vitamin C, and then he added an unusual thing. He rented a projector and rented Marx Brothers and Three Stooges movies and all the cartoons he could find. For hours each day, he would take his Vitamin C and watch the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges and would laugh his head off. What he discovered was that ten minutes of hearty laughter gave him a whole hour free from pain. So he would watch those movies over and over and over again. He discovered, as he did this, that he began to get better. The day came when he went back to the doctors and they said, “We don’t know what happened, because this was an incurable disease; but as far as we know, you are completely cured.” He lived about another 20 years after that and wrote a book called Anatomy of an Illness, in which he made the point that your mental attitude, the cheerfulness or lack thereof, has a great deal to do with whether you get sick, how bad you get sick, whether you get well, and how quickly you get well. All I want to say is that what he discovered is nothing more than what Solomon told us 3000 years ago, which is that "a merry heart causes good healing."
