Sometimes God makes me laugh... I was having a bad day the other day and out of nowhere I get this desire in me to laugh. Laughing out loud in class is usually not a problem for me because I laugh all the time. However, on this particular day I was done. My body was physically done and so was my spirit, at least I thought so. I had been filled with anxiety all day and I had spent a good portion of my breaks from class getting sick from worry. This anxiety had been with me all weekend and by Monday I was done.
On this day, I went to a Women's Bible Study. To be honest, I really did not want to go to this study and I was not in the "mood" to go, but I went any ways. God gave me more peace in that hour then I had had all weekend, this blew my mind. I really couldn't understand why I had been trying to get rid of my anxiety all weekend and then all of a sudden in the place where I didn't want to be God decide okay let's remove this worry. (I have to admit that this added to my confusion and frustration.) After the study, my first reaction was okay I am done, I am leaving. However, I knew I had to finish out the school day. I went into my next class still thinking about the Bible study and determined not to talk in class so that I could just sit there thinking about everything. Then it hit me, I was listening to my friend Sarah give an example of one of our grammar rules and I lost it. I just started laughing. She didn't even say anything really funny, but I just started laughing so hard that I started to cry. It was great. God knew I needed to laugh.
After a weekend/week of stress and anxiety, it was almost like God said okay you need to laugh so He just put this joy in my heart that just made me burst out into laughter. That might have not been the most appropriate time to laugh out loud but it was for my heart. After that laugh, I still did not have much energy but my spirit was definitely a bit better. It was like in that moment of laughter I saw a glimmer of hope that things were going to get better.
I can recall one other time where that had happened. I had just returned home from a mission trip to Italy and the team and I were doing a group prayer. We were all stressed and the tension in the group was really intense. We were in the middle of praying and I lost it. I just started laughing so hard that I about fell over with laughter. That was not an appropriate time to laugh but the Lord knew that we all need to laugh. Before, I could stop laughing and apologize for interrupting the prayer the whole team was bursting into laughter (2 people did actually fall on floor laughing) and the tension was lifted.
God used those moments of laughter to bring me back to Himself. I knew that everything was not automatically better in that moment but that moment of laughter and joy reminded me that He is with me and He also reminded me of His love for me. In grammar class, I wanted to continue laughing out loud but at the same time start really crying, because God was reaching out to me in my moment of weakness in a way that only He knows how to do. God knew what I needed in that moment and He provided me with everything I needed.
