God's Humor

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And again, that's masculinejourney.org. Jim, you have the topic for us this week. That's like two out of three weeks. Well, I keep opening my mouth and you guys seem to like it.

And I think you're getting less and less picky. So we really need to go back to that. Call in if you have any show ideas. We had such a good time last week with, I forget what it was. I wasn't paying attention.

There was some good show last time, but we had a blast doing it. It was funny. And so I just threw out there God's sense of humor and it took. Squirrel. There was a squirrel that you couldn't hear because, well, squirrels don't talk, but he's close by. He is the smallest one in the room though.

An old squirrel. He's easy to catch. That's why he's here. That's Harold we're talking about if you guys don't know. So anyway, so we're talking about God's humor. So you're stating that God has a humorous side to him.

Yes. And in researching this topic in great depth for 15 or 20 minutes on Monday, I ran across the fact that there's nothing in the Bible about Jesus laughing and so much of what he said really was to me funny. You know that if you, if you put a smile on his face, the Bible reads totally differently. And I'd recognize that many years ago, but uh, Hollywood has done us at this service and, you know, making God and God is serious, but he also created so much, including us. That is funny that if we're in his image, he has to have the divine. And as I like to say it, infinite sense of humor. And that has been quite often how he's spoken to me in my life.

That's for me as well. And we're going to get to some of that. I want to go ahead and play a clip from one of those Hollywood movies that portray God in a humorous light though. This is from Bruce Almighty. And in this exchange, Bruce has been given God's powers.

He's had them for some total of about a week, I think it says in the clip. And they're overlooking a very beautiful view. And Bruce is not really sure where they are.

And we kind of pick up the clip with him asking about where they are. Really something, isn't it? Is this heaven? No, this is Mount Everest.

You should flip on the Discovery Channel from time to time. But I guess you can't now. Being dead and all. I'm dead? Nah, I'm just messing with you. That's not funny, man. That is not funny. And what about the voices in my head? Is that part of the hilarity? No, those are prayers, man. You keep ignoring them, they're going to build up on you like that. But it's just noise.

I can't understand them. You're not listening, son. Let's see. You've had my powers for a little over a week now. How many people have you helped? You know, I took care of a few things. I righted a few wrongs in my own life first, okay? I was going to help the others.

I think I could help the world. The world? That wasn't the world.

That was just Buffalo between 57th Street and Commonwealth. I didn't want to start you off with more than you can handle. Well, you took the job, Bruce, so I suggest you get to it. Now, Jim, you'd made the comment before the show started, this is your favorite God character as portrayed in the movies, right? Absolutely.

And before him, it was George, but that's been a long time past. But he really had that, he has a sense of humor, and yet he's always working towards straightening Bruce and then Evan out later. And I really appreciated that and the showing of it.

I also liked the Shaq God quite a bit, but we're not going to say she was my favorite. So I messed with people. There was still some humor in that.

Yeah, there was as well. And that's why God's chosen to work with me a lot of the time is with humor, right? And so I think that's probably why I really liked Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty so much was just, you got to see the playfulness of God. And you touched on, if we're made in his image, we also should have some playfulness.

We should also have a sense of humor, like God does. And I think that it's fun just to kind of think about that, but I want to go ahead and get to another short clip, because I want to talk about what does humor actually do for us physically in the body? And this comes from Patch Adams. And what this is, is Patch is sitting on a bed that he's having the feet come up, then the head come up and the feet come up and the head come up. And his boss, for lack of a better term, walks in and says, what are you doing?

Right? Because he's not supposed to be visiting patients, but he's there trying to lift their spirits. And I want you to listen to what he says about what humor physically does to the body.

Oh, I surrender. I'll tell you what you want to know. Do you want to tell me what it is you think you're doing? Just give me a few laughs. And the American Journal of Medicine has found that laughter increases secretion of catecholamines and endorphins, which in turn increases oxygenation of the blood, relaxes the arteries, speeds up the heart, decreases blood pressure, which has a positive effect on all cardiovascular and respiratory ailments, as well as overall increasing the immune system response. So laughter does your body good, literally. Right. I know that we talk about what we enjoy being together on Tuesday nights, and we do share what we're going through. We share some of our struggles. We share some of that. But mostly a lot of what we share is this laughter, isn't it, Jim?

Absolutely. And it is, I mean, it's a joy being here, both from a godly perspective and a earthly one. It's a lot of fun, and it is a time that's filled with God's joy. Well, would you like to kick us off on a story of God's humor with you?

I'll start with the ancient ones, and they're quick. My wife and I decided we were going to have two children, one boy, one girl, and God laughed. And he did give us the girl, and she was wonderful. And my wife was pregnant again, and two weeks, well, it was actually on, we're very close to the anniversary of that. On Valentine's Day, there was a problem with the pregnancy. And this was many years ago, so there wasn't a real common ultrasound. Everybody didn't get one. You got one if there was a problem. And Carolyn went to the hospital and had her ultrasound and came out crying.

And I'm sitting in my police car waiting for it. I said, oh, no, something terrible is wrong. And she came out and got in the car and said, we're going to have twins. And so we had twin boys.

So God gave us what we wanted and did some. And I always found that quite humorous. And the other thing was, I literally swore to God when I was 16 years old, I'd never step foot in another Southern Baptist church, because I was mad at the hellfire and brimstone I was hearing. And some 30, 40 years later, he had me not only in a Baptist church, but in a Baptist seminary. So that was God.

And that was, to me, quite funny. Darrell Bock Yeah, God's humor tends to look like me eating my words. I mean, that happens a lot more frequently. It's really changed how I phrase things. I don't use words like never.

I'm never going to do that. I try to avoid those, because I've learned those are the ones I end up usually having to eat. Darrell Bock Amen, brother.

Darrell Bock Yeah. One for me, and I've shared it on the air in the past. I remember going through a time where I was really just down on myself. I was struggling just with some sin nature, and just not liking the way I was handling some things. And so, you know, I'm sitting in my car, it's at lunch, and I'm eating my lunch, and I'm kind of praying, kind of not praying. And, you know, I'm saying, God, you know, I just, I'm sorry, you know, I just tend to always just blow it, you know, I end up where I don't want to be, right?

And I know that I need to be able to avoid getting here, those types of things. And I just hear him say the word grace. And it's, well, God, I don't deserve grace. I mean, I knew. I knew, and I'd given him this long dialogue. I mean, I knew where this road would end. I knew that I would end up here. I mean, I obviously made choices that I shouldn't have made to get here, right? I don't deserve grace. And, you know, and so I thought I pleaded my case pretty well. And then there was a long pause. He's like, isn't that how it works? And I literally just started laughing, you know, and I'm like, yeah, I get it.

Grace is my definition. I don't deserve it, right? But it allowed me to just take the pressure off of myself and then turn to him and say, okay, what do we need to do to fix it?

Right? Because I don't want to feel like this again. I don't want to be here again.

How do we fix this, you know, and turn back into him? Because that self-righteous behavior of not deserving grace or taking grace was keeping me away from the one thing that was going to help me get healing. Right? And it sounded like, boy, definitely the right religious thing to do is just, you know, hold, you know, white knuckle and not give myself any grace. But no, God was like, no, that's not what it is here. And again, for me, that's just the whole humor that really makes me let down my guard.

Right. And it pulls me closer to him. And again, as we talked about in the Morgan Freeman character and as he plays God, he's very good at that. Making the subtle points that make you laugh, but also get the point. It needs to be meaningful.

It does. I keep wanting to shove this over to Robby just because he usually is not quiet this long. It's a test. We're going to see how long he can go without speaking. I'll give you one other story. We've got a minute going into break. And it reminded me, Jim, of having kids.

Right? Heidi and I had had our oldest son, Caleb, and it had been, you know, five years and some change. And we're going to have another one. And so, well, I tell you what, we're going to finish that story when we come back because I didn't give myself enough time.

And Keith's literally holding up the thing, telling me 30 seconds left. But now go to masculinejourney.org. We hope to have a bootcamp announcement coming up in the next week or so.

We're just waiting to confirm some things, but we're planning on the late April, early May. So kind of keep that on your calendar, masculinejourney.org. Now what do we do?

Just be yourselves. Where are you going? I'm going to pick a fight. If it feels like every day is picking a fight, then you might want to come listen to The Masculine Journey and find out why we use clips like these to illustrate the story God is telling in the lives of men today. The truth is God designed you to pick a fight, but which fights do we pick?

Well, grab your gear and come on a quest. Every Saturday at noon. And now The Masculine Journey After Hours Podcast. Masculine Journey Radio. P.O.

Box 550, Kernersville, North Carolina, 27285. No, I'm making you listen to the whole thing, because you guys gave me a hard time about my boat, so I wasn't going to cut it off. I was going to make you listen to the whole thing.

What do they call those balls that reflect the light? We were, you know, Andy turned off the light disco ball so we could all enjoy it more. That would be called Gospel, I believe. Okay, okay. Yeah, it was B.B.

Winans, and I probably said the name wrong. It's a gospel ball. It's not a disco ball. With that song, maybe. But I actually enjoyed that song. All right, next time we do a show on God's humor, you can find a laughter bump. I did like the way, it did say in the clip, and I wanted to play a few moments longer. It says, laughter is like medicine, right?

We heard that from Patch Adams' clip a minute ago. But let it heal your broken heart, right? And I think there's some things that it can't heal it, but boy, it makes it feel a lot better, right, when you can just laugh through some things. And, you know, I think a lot of times we hit some stressful points in our life, we either go in one direction or the other, and when we can learn to laugh at them, it seems to go a lot better. How many times in your life have you said, I had to laugh or I'd cry?

Yeah. I mean, that for me is very common. I'll get to the point of breaking, and then just laugh about it, because God's got it.

Why am I so upset? Yeah, as mine gets more stressful, I tend to get more, cynical is not really the word, but humorous about it, just because I don't really know what else to do with it. I realize you're not Paul Harvey, but I'm waiting on the rest of the story. Oh yeah, I did have a story, didn't I? Yeah, okay, so before the break, we were talking about my wife and I, when I was married, we'd had a son, and then there'd been a period of time we hadn't had any more kids. This was our, we'd already had three at that point, and so I was putting some pressure on her. I said, look, okay, I'm going to be turning 40. If we're going to have another one, we need to have another one, because I don't want to be, my dad was 49 when I came along.

I don't want to be that dad, right? Your clock was ticking. My clock was ticking, right?

They don't say guys have a clock, and some of them don't, you know, but I definitely had a clock ticking, because I grew up with an older dad. I didn't want to have my sons grow up with an older dad, and so we said, okay, we're going to go ahead and start trying to have a baby, and like, well, we definitely want to avoid Caleb's birthday. That was our whole goal. We're going to avoid Caleb's birthday.

We're going to get it, you know, a couple months away from his birthday, just so we don't have to go there, and so, you know, we started, you know, doing what you have to do. You said you didn't want your kids to grope? Was that involved? No. Okay, just checking.

Okay, thank you, Robby. I probably enunciated something incorrectly there. So anyway, long story short, we try everything to avoid it, and then all of a sudden, you know, Heidi had kept this journal of, you know, everything that happened with Caleb's birth, you know, and she's looking along, and so it was coming up on the date when she'd found out she was pregnant, and so she did the test on the day that she'd found out before, and it said she was pregnant. We're like, okay, coincidence. It could have been early.

It could have been late. Kept going all the way along. Long story short, we get towards the end of the period where she's carrying the baby, and it's time for the birth coming up here pretty soon, and so we're doing everything to get the baby to come early. We're eating spicy food. We're out on swing sets, you know, trying to use centrifugal force. Anything we can to get the baby to come, right?

Medically, other than breaking the water, anything to get the baby to come, not coming. So literally the day before Caleb's birthday, I'm like, look, do not do anything today. Caleb's birthday is tomorrow. We just rest.

Don't get off the couch. I don't care what you do, right? She goes into labor on Caleb's birthday, and the boys now share a birthday, you know, which the boys love it now, but it was just like as much as we try, I could just see God laughing going, you really think that you can control anything in this whole exchange? You did very little in the whole process, you know?

I mean, and now you think you can control when the baby comes, and so that was his humor. Yeah, long story. Not much of a payoff, but that was my story. We got it. All right. Well, Rob, you can talk now. Okay.

All right. So my clip is I just think that what God, what you already talked about is, you know, he just laughs when we think we know what we're doing. And as we get to be adults, you know, we really begin to think that we know what we're doing, and we're often taught by children. And so if you've ever seen the movie Pollyanna, actually this young girl teaches the whole town, and this is actually the turning point of the movie is when she is going to instruct the pastor here, the minister of the town, on, you know, and if you've seen the previous part of the movie, he is one of those hellfire and brimstone pastors to the max, and he's been upsetting everybody in town, and so she just has this casual little conversation with him, totally changes everything. Would you like someone to practice your sermon?

No, thank you, child. Mother and I used to be an audience to my father when he was practicing his sermons. He was a minister too, you know. Oh yes, yes, so he was. Do you like being a minister?

Do I like being a minister? Now, why would you ask a thing like that? Oh, the way you look just then reminded me of my father. Once I saw him sort of sad, like that, and I asked him. And what did he say? Said he was glad he was, but it made him sad sometimes when he just couldn't seem to get through to his congregation. Sounds familiar. I suppose every minister of God faces the same problem.

I suppose. Tell me, did your father ever solve the problem? Well, he read something one day they said helped him. In the bible? No, just something he read someplace. He had it put on this chain.

He wore it always. It's all I have of his. May I?

When you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will. Abraham Lincoln? He was the president. Yes, yes I know. But I never heard that before.

Neither of my father. Anyway, he said it started him thinking. And from then on, he was going to look for the good in people. That's when we started searching for the bible for the texts. The texts?

Yes. You know, my father called them the glad passages. You know, the happy ones like, um, uh, shout for joy, or be glad in the Lord. You know, like that.

You know, like that. There are 800 happy texts. Did you know that? No, I didn't know that.

Yes, well there are. And you know, my father said, if God took the trouble to tell us 800 times to be glad and rejoice, he must have wanted us to do it. So you think, I mean, how much did God enjoy, you know, that moment of this pastor who thinks he's going to straighten out the whole city, you know, gets this opportunity to be at school by this little girl. So talking about being schooled by a little girl, my older daughter, we took fishing in Colorado years ago. And one day, you know, after her daughter was born, my granddaughter, Lila, she said, you know, daddy, what would mean more to me than anything else in this world was that if you would take my daughter fishing the way you took me fishing in Colorado with your dad.

And the neat thing was my dad was alive. And when, so when Lila was about eight years old, we decided it was time. So I began the process of teaching Lila how to fish. And I don't recall when I taught her this particular lesson, but at some point, apparently I did. So we finally get to go to Colorado and my daughter went with us and she hadn't fished in years and years and years.

And Lila, you know, was somewhat learned, but she was a little impatient as little kids might be. And so they were constantly getting snagged, which happens in Colorado more than a lake in North Carolina. And so I was having to fix the reels and Lila would, this is my granddaughter, she would just put the bait in the water for, you know, like 20 seconds or maybe 10 seconds. And I got when I got one, she'd reel it back in, of course, get it snagged, get it looped around the reel.

It was always something like that. And it went on like this for, you know, a day and a half. And I was starting to get aggravated as those who know me well know happens.

And so she was probably 10 times she'd done it. I got one, I got one, I got one. And, you know, there it was. And so finally I got miffed and said, Lila, you have got to leave your bait in the water long enough to catch a fish. And she says, Papa, you have violated the first rule of fishing.

And all of a sudden it was racing through my mind. Who taught, how would she know the first rule of fishing? I'm the only person that would tell you what the world is the first rule of the fishing.

And I was like, Lila, what's the first rule of fishing? And she said, have fun. And I said, Oh, oh, I see. I see.

And of course, you know, I'd known that intellectually, but I don't think I'd ever experienced it in my heart. Like Lila taught it to me that day. And so what happened actually was I said, Lila, why don't we pray? I said, I'll pray that God gives me patience with you.

And that I'll have fun. And I'm going to pray that you have patience fishing. Let the fish have enough time to get on the hook. And meanwhile, why don't we pray that you catch some fish? And so we stood there on the back of this little waterfall right there is the most picturesque scene.

It's beautiful. We prayed. She put a bait back in the water, right? We cast it in there a little bit.

And I look out of the corner of my eye and my daughter Tess now has a snag and she's swinging her pole like you would when you have a snag. And I'm like, Oh, here we go. So I start walking down the pain bank. I'm not gone five seconds. I hear this. I got one.

I got one. And I turn around and Lila has a huge trout and she's, she's, you know, I'm seeing the pole bandage. I got you a little Dickens and I can see the fish going all over the street. She catches the next forecast.

She catches a fish and her, and her mother started catching fish and it was just like the whole adventure completely turned around all, you know, right there. And you know, God was just laughing it up. I mean, I've laughed about it for years.

It's, it's one of those lessons he taught me. I'm just, um, I bet if we pulled the room, there's eight of us in here and Keith in the other room, um, how many people have actually seen Pollyanna? I think it's, it's over the over under is probably three.

I don't know, but I've heard about 50 clips. I feel like I've seen it. I have seen it more than once.

Okay. And I really don't think I ever liked it. It means a lot to Rob.

That's why I watched it. Well, we just obviously just touched on this topic. We're going to talk more about it in the after hours program. And so if you, if you don't know how to get that, go to your favorite podcast location and look up masculine journey radio, and you're going to find our podcast there and you can go click on the after hours that talks about God's humor and boom, you found it. And so we're going to record that now to be available to you hearing about now, because you're hearing this after we've recorded it.

So you can go get it right away. Masculine journey.org. And again, we hope to have an upcoming bootcamp announcement within the next week or so. So pay attention and check out the website.

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