Holy Laughter
Every day at work we take time to pray together as a staff. We pray through the Psalms every 3 months using a Lectio method, and it has been a great experience these past couple of years. A lot of introspection and a lot of listening for God. Pretty counter cultural to what we are doing, and very different from the high energy stuff we do most of the day.
During the summer, we add an extra 15-20 minutes onto our time (during the school year we just do 30 min) so that we can do some worship through song as well. It's a smashing way to start the day, and I enjoy it because we do more of the black gospel style of worship.
Well, the other day when we got to the singing part, we all just got the giggles. Really bad. And then we all just started clowning around and cracking jokes until we could hardly breathe anymore and tears were starting to form in our eyes. It was the first time all summer something like this had happened, so once we were recomposed we took an opportunity to process why we had lost it.
As we talked, our founder mentioned that sometimes the Spirit knows that we need to laugh. He explained how we had all be carrying a lot of stuff around the past couple of weeks, and that when you are in the middle of all the drama you don't realize how it is wearing on you. And there comes this point where you need a release, and sometimes you cry it out but there are other times where the Spirit invites you to laugh it out.
It was crazy how right he was. Last week was really emotional in that two of our kids we work closely with were essentially orphaned. The matriarch grandmother of one family had passed away, and now one of the girls she cared for was in a custody-limbo that one of our staff has been really involved in and supporting her through. One of our boys had his mom up and move with the rest of his siblings to Memphis last week, leaving this young man with his grandmother and her 4 teenage kids.
My heart has also been burdened as I've seen a third middle school boy have to take on too much responsibility. His mom has a good job, but she has to work nights, so he is the defacto caretaker of his younger siblings. He makes sure they get fed at 9pm at night. He walks them down to the drugstore on Saturday mornings to pick up cereal for them to eat. And it's draining him, because it's too much for a kid to handle.
And then we had one young man who was one of the first to be a part of the ministry 8 years ago suffer from a point-blank gunshot that critically injured him, though it does look like he will survive. It sucked because he had actually gotten out and into the military, and was doing something productive with his life. He can survive the service but comes back to the hood and gets shot.
So all of this stuff was just there. We were all carrying different parts of it, and it was heavy. And that morning God knew that our hearts didn't need to sing. Our hearts needed to laugh and be silly and we needed to see each other smile.
So we did.
And it was a holy moment.
Fair Dinkum
During the summer, we add an extra 15-20 minutes onto our time (during the school year we just do 30 min) so that we can do some worship through song as well. It's a smashing way to start the day, and I enjoy it because we do more of the black gospel style of worship.
Well, the other day when we got to the singing part, we all just got the giggles. Really bad. And then we all just started clowning around and cracking jokes until we could hardly breathe anymore and tears were starting to form in our eyes. It was the first time all summer something like this had happened, so once we were recomposed we took an opportunity to process why we had lost it.
As we talked, our founder mentioned that sometimes the Spirit knows that we need to laugh. He explained how we had all be carrying a lot of stuff around the past couple of weeks, and that when you are in the middle of all the drama you don't realize how it is wearing on you. And there comes this point where you need a release, and sometimes you cry it out but there are other times where the Spirit invites you to laugh it out.
It was crazy how right he was. Last week was really emotional in that two of our kids we work closely with were essentially orphaned. The matriarch grandmother of one family had passed away, and now one of the girls she cared for was in a custody-limbo that one of our staff has been really involved in and supporting her through. One of our boys had his mom up and move with the rest of his siblings to Memphis last week, leaving this young man with his grandmother and her 4 teenage kids.
My heart has also been burdened as I've seen a third middle school boy have to take on too much responsibility. His mom has a good job, but she has to work nights, so he is the defacto caretaker of his younger siblings. He makes sure they get fed at 9pm at night. He walks them down to the drugstore on Saturday mornings to pick up cereal for them to eat. And it's draining him, because it's too much for a kid to handle.
And then we had one young man who was one of the first to be a part of the ministry 8 years ago suffer from a point-blank gunshot that critically injured him, though it does look like he will survive. It sucked because he had actually gotten out and into the military, and was doing something productive with his life. He can survive the service but comes back to the hood and gets shot.
So all of this stuff was just there. We were all carrying different parts of it, and it was heavy. And that morning God knew that our hearts didn't need to sing. Our hearts needed to laugh and be silly and we needed to see each other smile.
So we did.
And it was a holy moment.
Fair Dinkum