Adding Music to Our Chapters

 

This week you are prayerfully pondering the chapter titles of life, the stories you tell yourself, along side the meaningful moments that have left an impression. Yesterday we added a soundtrack.  Because every good story needs some music. 

 

(Insert, “Celebrate Good Time” by Kool and the Gang here…I know I am showing my 80s roots!)

 

Today, I want you to focus on the moments in life that overflowed with joy…those “celebrations of good times”.  If you have not included and incorporated moments of holy hilarity, times when the tears came from laughing so hard your side ached, when joy was what fed and fueled your life, please receive this invitation as a way to continue to revise/review the chapters of your life.

 

As I’ve confessed, I was schooled in the lesson that life was a struggle rather than an adventure.  One of the ways we can re-write our story, is to hold times of joy – as we heard on Sunday.  One of the ways we can honor the adventure of life is to name moments you tasted heaven while still on earth.  To shine a light on your heart being so full you thought it might burst.

 

One joyful moment from my childhood is a photograph of me on Christmas morning vacuuming the carpet of tiny pieces of wrapping paper after opening presents.  Because apparently, I’ve always had some OCD with cleanliness.  That makes me smile.

Or I think of our band trip in high school to California, being peer pressured into riding Space Mountain, spending the whole ride shouting, “Make it stop!”  Good times.

Or my wedding day and wearing a hole in the carpet of the narthex pacing back and forth before the ceremony with nervousness until I saw Gina turn down the aisle.

Or the time I preached my first sermon here at our church (it was on John 1:35-42).

 

Is there room in the story you are telling yourself for joy, goodness, grace, and laughter?  I pray you will hear and hold this invitation to listen and lean into God’s presence.  Our minds can be like Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good.  We need to exercise the muscle of laughter’s healing art.  Not because it is some magical spell that makes everything better.  Not because we all need to be eternal optimists.  But if we never take time to hold the grace and goodness, we miss one of the ways God shows up in our lives.

 

I can’t wait to hear all the holy hilarity of YOUR life.  I pray that you will let this part of your story loose so the joyful moments and memories can edit the words you choose for chapter titles and top lists.  May there be a holy melody of God’s love that will not let you go surrounding each moment.