Smile: Fwd: How much laughter do you bring to your home?

From our earliest days, much of life makes up its mind around the dinner table. Good food and fun moments go together. Is it the same at your house?

Many of our favorite family memories include sitting around the table after the meal has been enjoyed with the kids—now with their kids—full of questions and begging for humorous stories. "Tell us about the time . . . that Aunt Luci taught you to smoke dry cedar bark rolled up in notebook paper . . . or you drove the motorcycle through your high school English literature class . . . or when you and your buddies put the football coach's miniature Crosley on the roof of an equipment shed on your high school campus . . ."

Your family may already know your stories by heart, but they still want to hear them, and truth be told, it does us good to remember them ourselves. Perhaps in the telling of those crazy things that happen in life, we learn how not to take ourselves too seriously. We lighten up!

Yes, yes, I know—life is serious . . . but that doesn't mean your family time must always be.

I've said for years that I want my children to remember not a preacher who yelled and pounded the pulpit as much as a dad who laughed and had fun—to remember the man who threw their mother in the pool and lived to tell the story. (Throwing their mother in the pool was no big deal. Living to tell the story . . . now that was!)

We live in a world that robs the fun out of life. The world emphasizes our sense of responsibility, of duty and propriety, but seldom does anybody emphasize the need for a sense of humor. Yet it is a sense of humor that keeps us sane. People often write me and say, "You can stop preaching, but don't stop laughing." Sometimes they add, "Yours is the only laughter that comes into our home." Now that is tragic.

I know of no greater need today than for joy! In spite of the serious circumstances around us, we need to remember Solomon's counsel: "A joyful heart makes a cheerful face, but when the heart is sad, the spirit is broken. . . . All the days of the afflicted are bad, but a cheerful heart has a continual feast" (Proverbs 15:13, 15).

A good, loud time of laughter is overdue.

In the past, our team at Insight for Living has captured some of m

cd: Laughter, Volume 3: Chuck's Formula for Family Fun

y lighthearted stories and jokes and put them on Laughter CDs. They've been a hit. Now, because more of you have asked, "Got any more stories?" we've gathered some new ones, this time specifically on the subject of family life. I think you will really enjoy them. This new CD is titled, Laughter, Volume 3: Chuck's Formula for Family Fun. After fifty years of preaching, there are plenty of stories to go around. In fact, some of these stories have never even been on the air.

Here's your joy prescription:

Get inspired to tell your own stories and fill the walls of your own home with laughter. Give your kids great memories for their museum. If you didn't share fun times with your children, why not do that now with your grandchildren? (It's easier with the grandchildren!)