Laugh

My wife told me yesterday I am not a relaxed person, or a relaxing person or something like this.  The comment came when she was opining about how much more relaxing it is to travel with the friends whose guests we are this week.  She made some attempt to suggest that there was something good, or at least endearing about my enervating presence but I remain unconvinced.

I can take little umbrage at this for I am, without question, what people often describe as intense.  I take life, work and even play seriously. (Tamara does not see how 400 mile cycle trips could be fun - although she has yet to try...). I remember that my mother used to say, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." This from the woman who slept about 4 hours a night and often was found making bread at 5 am.  Very little sitting about eating bonbons for her.

Being serious about work is a virtue encouraged by generations of my Scots ancestors.  The characteristic of the Protestant Reformation that most left an impression on my family was perhaps the work ethic of the same name.  All well and good.  But my mother was right about Jack.

As a Christian I am attentive, I hope, to the way in which my behaviors and attitudes affect how others perceive the faith.  And all intensity and seriousness has its drawbacks.  One of my greatest objections to serious Christians when I was younger was just exactly the fact that they seemed to be the Jacks of which my mother was speaking.  The Christian club in my high school was a collection, I am sad to say, of people who seemed to have had their sense of humor surgically removed.  Serious and intense.  Dull.  To be fair I made no particular attempt to get beyond the surface and discover their inner joviality. (Joviality they might have objected to in principle as it comes from the influence of the pagan Roman god Jove.)  But I come back to my struggle -- there was nothing about them which incited any such attempt.

Too often we forget the exhortation that opens Psalm 100: "Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands!" And Paul's reminder that God loves a cheerful giver.  I know that in the context Paul is commenting on financial giving, but might it not also apply to the giving of our selves, souls and bodies?  Just a thought.

It is worth noting that I first took Christian faith as something desirable when I met a young woman in France who loved Jesus and life, dare I say it, jovially.  She was the kind of person who, for the sheer joy of it, would turn a cartwheel in the street. (I used to have photographic evidence, but alas I have lost that snapshot.)  I remain indebted to her witness -- she was the first person who portrayed to me something appealing about being a Christian.

All very interesting, you might be saying, but where is he going?  And that, dear reader, is the question.  I have always desired (seriously and intensely) to be a writer.  This blog has been part of the fulfillment of that desire for me.  I have often thought that the most beneficial and useful sort of writing I could do would be to encourage people to a deeper knowledge of God.  This I long for.   He is always, larger, more glorious, more gracious and merciful than we think.  It is also something I believe he longs for.  One of the few ways in which I reflect his character.

But all seriousness and intensity makes Jack a dull boy, and frankly, a poor witness.  There is something else I desire -- to laugh and to hear others laugh.  "If you can't be good," think I, "at least be funny."  As I continue to write this, and other things (I hope), I will be pleased if it encourages others to deeper love of Jesus.  But I will also be pleased if, from time to time, you laugh.

And laughing may not be far from what he longs for either.  In Lewis' last of the Narnian chronicles,  The Last Battle, Aslan says to those assembled, "You do not yet seem as happy as I mean you to be."  I think that might apply to more than just me.