Wild

So… Well… Umm… Friday night and Saturday night were just crazy. Wild. Completely and utterly unpredictable.

I’m going to just cover Friday night here. I had written up both of them on Sunday, but my Web host went into maintenance about the time I went to post my recaps and I lost much of what I had written about Saturday. I certainly want to do it justice, so that will have to wait.

But without further ado, I bring you Friday night’s recap…

The giggles broke out at church late Friday night and about 15 or 20 of us couldn’t bring ourselves to stop until two hours had past. Why did it happen? I really don’t know. Sometimes you just get laughing and can’t stop.

Remember the Seinfeld episode with the PEZ dispenser? Something pretty similar to that happened to me and an old high school friend at a National Honors Society induction ceremony. After walking across the auditorium stage to receive my certificate, I sat down in my seat next to Rhonda McLean. I proceeded to look at my certificate and saw that the name on it was “Effie McFee”–another girl in our class. This cracked me up, so I showed it to Rhonda. In the quiet of the auditorium, she tried to stifle laughing out loud, but to no avail. Didn’t work for me, either. For a good 10 minutes or so, we tried to hold back, but it was useless. We caught quite a few looks from those around us. I think her mom was a few rows in front of us and we embarrassed her pretty good, too. Good memory; probably one of my favorites from high school.

The best I can recall, Friday night’s episode got triggered when a college student, who had been laying on the floor enjoying some one-on-one time with the Lord, received help getting up from another woman in our church. Something went wrong (or right) and they both ended up on the floor. And they started laughing. Another had already been suppressing the giggles a bit, so she got pulled into the bout pretty quickly. Within a few minutes, many others had been sucked in and it was all over from there.

A lot can go through your mind when you’re laughing—intensely at times—for two hours. God spoke to me quite a bit: everything from showing me how I was a little baby that he was tickling to how I was a mighty warrior laughing in the face of adversaries. He showed me how I was laughing away some weariness from the discipleship process and laughing on behalf of family members who carry sorrow. When I started wondering why I was laughing so long, he asked me if I enjoyed laughing at funny movies or with friends and if I ever wanted those times cut short. I thought, No. I wish ‘Dumb and Dummer’ were three hours long! And so I embraced the opportunity and atmosphere and laughed some more.

For those of you struggling to envision me rolling around on the floor laughing for hours, that’s part of the beauty of it: that’s rather “out of character” for me. A good chunk of our church’s core membership saw me as they never had before… and I saw many of them in ways I never had before. Those two facts were the foundation for a new level of unity. Our guards were down; we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable; we were goofy and simply enjoyed ourselves. What better place for that to happen than in church?

So… that’s the Friday night summary. I could talk about it much more, such as the plain-old therapeutic effects of laughter and why God would maybe want us all to laugh more, but… not now :)

Stay tuned for the exciting story of Saturday’s night!