March 13, 2024
Episode #241
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Humor can play a significant role in helping us control our tongues. David and Karen Mains discuss that: “A rather overlooked cure for mouth disease is humor, and especially the ability to laugh at yourself.”
Episode Transcript
David: This visit we are informing you that a rather overlooked cure for mouth disease is humor and especially the ability to laugh at yourself. Read the short paragraph that begins this chapter Karen if you don’t mind.
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Karen: “Medicine for Mouth Disease,” that’s the title of one of my books.
David: And the subtitle is “A Miracle Cure for the Troublesome Tongue.”
Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his wife noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.
Karen: Two podcasts visit back, we introduced the topic of spiritual mouth disease, and we zeroed in on the disease of lying.
David: Our key sentence at that time was the exciting truth that medicine is available that heals all manner of mouth disease.
Karen: And we told you that the discipline of silence is one of the miracle cures for mouth disease or for better control of the tongue.
David: This visit we are informing you that a rather overlooked cure for mouth disease is humor and especially the ability to laugh at yourself. Read the short paragraph that begins this chapter Karen if you don’t mind.
Karen: All of us face times when we wonder if we will ever laugh again. These are the dreadful grinding sandpaper days that stretch on and on, abrading sensitive, half-heeled wounds filing away at the tissue of the mind. They seem like wearing eternities that buffet us with the attrition of pain, grief, despair, illness, or loss. Now I have known moments like these and I wondered where laughter had gone, only to discover that laughter cloaks itself in disguise and springs up from its hiding place to surprise us when we are most guaranteed with the enormity of life. It shouts like a little kid. Olly, Olly, Oxen free!
It invites us to rush to life’s game again, to cast aside for a moment the weights of labor and responsibility, and to roll over and over down the greening hillside, tumbling faster, bumping, plummeting, strangling for air between curdled shouts and gas. In fact, I’ve come to discover that laughter is God’s good friend.
David: How many times have we laughed Karen during difficult times? I guess it’s just immediately had stories come to your mind. I’m thinking when years and years back we began a church ministry in the city of Chicago. I had gone in to be the associate pastor at Moody Memorial Church. They didn’t have a pastor and they had been working for a long time to get one, but they felt they needed to …
Karen: …have an interim on something.
David: Yeah. And I took it knowing that it might be a problem because it wasn’t long after I was in there that they called a pastor, a remarkable man, Dr. George Sweeting, who eventually became the president of Moody Bible Institute. He had been told by the board as a part of his coming he would be able to choose his own staff.
Karen: Which is fair, we understood that.
David: I appreciated him, he became a very good friend. And so, I have nothing but pleasant memories. But man, I had to scramble to say, “Okay, what are we going to do now?” Because there’s somebody coming to replace me, and we have to start over again. I talked to him about starting a church and he was very open to that.
Karen: This was the time when a lot of the white churches were fleeing the city or leaving the city because neighborhoods were changing.
David: Yeah, they called it white flight. So, the congregation would leave but the building was still there. So, we decided a neighborhood we wanted to work toward beginning a church there. And for the first, I would say half a year, it was a struggle.
Karen: It started with 27 people.
David: But it was enough to give us hope. I remember early on in that ministry saying, “Lord, if we’re late once again in terms of our paychecks, if I just had an extra $50 this week, I could make it through, I think.”
Karen: We had a small staff. In principle as the senior pastor, you made sure that everyone was paid before you were paid, but our checks were generally late.
David: “$50 would do it, God.” I remember praying in the kitchen and I thought, “Well, we’ve been running tight for a while now, we’ll see what God does.” It was not even 10 minutes later that the doorbell rang. And I could see who it was because there was kind of a window on each side of the door. It was this woman. She was a good woman, but she highly spiritualized everything. She would open up a conversation with me by saying, “Did God speak to you in a special way today?” And I would say, “Well, not really that I’m aware of.” She said, “Well, he spoke to me in a special way today.” She would tell me what she wanted me to do.
So, here was this woman and I didn’t think about it because she would stop by quite often. So, I opened the door and she said, “The Lord told me to come today and talk to you and give you some money. In fact, he said $50,” and I almost fell over. I thought, “Lord, of all the people you have who you could talk with to do something like this, did it have to be?” And then I realized again, probably she was one of those rare ones who was listening to the Lord in a strange way. And the Lord said to me today, go over and tell David and Karen, here’s the money that you need. I mean, it’s just ironic, isn’t it?
Karen: It’s a huge lesson in our lives that sometimes the people who you don’t feel fit the mold appropriately, you know.
David: Yeah, I would have had some wealthy businessmen stop by. We didn’t have any in the church.
Karen: They are often the ones who do hear the Lord because they’re so dependent upon him because of their oddity. I think that’s a lot of what happens with them. But anyway, it was a great lesson in our lives.
David: Yeah, and Karen, I’m thinking about another woman, Dolores Kern, just kind of the opposite, almost a reporter like in terms of a book she wrote. And I had her on a guest on the program when I actually moved to working with the Chapel of the Air Ministry. She had written a best-selling book. Do you remember, Dolores?
Karen: Yes, I do.
David: The book was called “Traits of a Healthy Family.” And I was saying this is what is good about families when they’re functioning the way they ought to.
Karen: Psychology mostly emphasized examining what was wrong in the human personality. It’s been a lot of time. And I think she was sort of on the forward edge of the psychological world beginning to examine what was right, what caused health, and what were the attributes of that. So anyway, she wrote this book “Traits of a Healthy Family.” She lists one trait as the healthy family has a sense of play and humor.
David: That was the first time I had heard such a connection.
Karen: She composed her list from responses to a survey given to over 500 family professionals, all kinds. Teachers, doctors, pastors, social workers, psychologists. I’m just going to read a paragraph as far as what she says.
A sense of humor in the family also keeps things in perspective and works as an antidote to drudgery, depression, and conflict within families. Members of families that have a sense of humor can say to themselves, “I am not the center of the universe, even in my own family.”
This situation I’m in is not going to change my life. In fact, I can laugh about it. Members who have this distance on themselves help diffuse potentially explosive family situations. Then the author goes on to say that these healthy families use humor positively, diffusing anger, perhaps reiterating a quip made by a child earlier in his life, that will in the present alleviate tension and stress. This happened in our family. Once when one of our children was small and had been misbehaving, he found himself at the end of a stern parental lecture. What are we going to do as the adult? In self-resignation, the child suggested, “Why don’t we just throw me in a garbage?”
David: Yeah, it’s so sad.
Karen: That was so cute. Throw me in a garbage. He realized he’d been misbehaving. And that has become kind of a signature statement for any time in our family when one member is frustrated with himself. Just throw me in a garbage, I guess.
David: Let me go right to our key sentence, okay? A rather overlooked cure for mouth disease is humor and especially the ability to laugh at yourself.
Karen: We have a wonderful story from our past. You had a group of pastors that had gotten together. I can’t remember which group of pastors this was.
David: It was just kind of an ad hoc group. And they chose four couples they felt were leaders, and they asked us to be the ones who led the time together. Those can be difficult times if they start trying to impress one another.
Karen: Oh, one up in one another. I mean, it’s a human tendency.
David: These were four exceptional couples. But we decided to be safe. We would start a different way. And we said, “Let us each one talk about our most embarrassing moment in ministry.” And I said, “Karen and I will begin.” And then you can kind of go around the room. I know you need a little time to think because you didn’t expect this to happen. So, you told a story. I don’t remember what it was. I remember my story was about my first baptismal when I’d never been taught how to baptize someone.
Karen: You went through seminary, but they didn’t give you practical instructions in ministry sometimes.
David: Probably still don’t. With the new church that we began, we began to have converts. And then there was a matter of where do we baptize people? We didn’t have our own building.
Karen: We met in a Teamsters’ union hall that was given to us.
David: A friend opened up his church. It was an international. It was Japanese. He said to me, “You know, we’d never use that baptistry before, but you’re more than welcome to come if you can do it on a Sunday night. Which we did. It was the dead of winter, coldest night you know that you can imagine in Chicago, which is pretty cold. Snow and wind, but we found the church and the people came. There’s a good number of people who came to the baptismal.
Karen: I think you had two or three people you were baptizing. Do you remember?
David: I don’t remember. I only remember the first two, one way or the other. It wasn’t a baptismal like you see in the back. This was a very large tank, and the church was it probably seated about a hundred and there was only one step to the platform and the baptistry was in the platform on the floor. So, you’re almost eye level below where the people are in the congregation seated. Everything was fine. I scoped it all out. I had it figured out you know how I would do it and I’d practiced at home.
Karen: On me in the living room. Dip down, dip up. Yeah.
David: No water. One thing I hadn’t counted on Karen is that they ran the water, and it was probably about chest high. There was no heat in the water.
Karen: It was just pure cold water.
David: It was ice cube water. I walked in that and all of a sudden, it’s like your whole body is in shock. And I remember because the first person to be baptized was a woman. She was taller. And so, I had to say how do I compensate that I baptized her in the bigger part of the pool. And I did and I thought I wonder if I’ll be able to get her up. Well, as soon as she hit that water and went under, she came up like she’d been shot by a rocket. Then I hadn’t thought about where does this person go, after she has been baptized. And she looked at me and I kind of looked like, “Oh man I forgot about that.”
So, she walked up out of the baptismal. She walked to the front one step down and kind of looked around where to go. There was no one there with a towel or anything. It was just so dumb of me as a young dope. Anyway, she walked left and there was a door. She opened the door, and it was a broom closet. Well, she couldn’t stand in there with everybody else being baptized. So, she had to walk her wet footsteps across to the other side of the door. There was another door. She opened that and although weather came rushing in.
Karen: It was outside.
David: Yeah, it was an outside door. So, she walked back against to the middle aisle, and she had to walk down the center aisle to the basement where finally there was a person there with towels. At least I had gotten that part right. But oh man I you know so embarrassing. But the first one was done. And then the second one was a gentleman who was foreign who had been visited in the hospital by one of our new staff, Chinese American. And he had been miraculously healed. And he wanted to give his testimony as he was baptized because he had friends there. I didn’t think about giving him a time limit, but he walked on into the pool didn’t seem to bother him at all. I was just kind of tiptoeing up and down trying to get circulation of my little legs and he started to talk, and he went for quite a long while. And finally I thought, “Wow, I don’t know if I can stand in this baptismal tub any longer.” So, I put my arm around and I said, “You know what I mis-planned. I should have given you a whole time at the church to tell your story but why don’t you bring it to a stop and then we’ll arrange for that time. He said, “Well I want to say I have a couple more things and so he did.” And then I said, “Okay, we’ll baptize you, but I was so cold I wasn’t thinking straight.”
And I didn’t move him back to the center of the tank I just stayed where the steps down there cut off some of the space. “I will baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” I cracked his head against the side of the baptismal and I thought “Oh my god I have killed him,” because it was a loud crack and everybody heard that. And then he hit the cold water and bang oh he was up again.
Karen: It was just fine. This is your story. And you talked about some of the mistakes that you made in pastoring. Among these pastors we were working at.
David: And then these pastors and their wives each told stories and by the end of probably an hour and a half later we were just…
Karen: We were hollering tears. We were running down our cheeks it was so funny, and it got funnier and funnier and funnier.
David: And it was bonding.
Karen: Yes, it was.
David: We had an absolutely wonderful retreat because those people had used humor in a beautiful way in a self-deprecating way. I mean every pastor’s got his “What if I could relive a part of my ministry over again?”
Karen: Or every profession has that as well, so it was just a wonderful moment. It was the first time I think that was so remarkable that we realized the advantage of having humor being part of telling the funniest stories out of our lives to one another and being such a bonding thing.
David: Yeah, in fact a lot of times Karen, you’ll hear ministers tell deprecating stories in their sermon and their wonderful bonding times with the congregation.
Karen: Yeah.
David: Anyway, I want you to go to something a little bit more serious. Norman Cousins, he wrote anatomy of an illness about his own personal battle. Can you find that?
Karen: So, he writes in his book anatomy of an illness, this is Norman Cousins, of his personal battle against a rare arthritic-like disease about which doctors gave him no hope for cure. Analyzing his own condition from an informed layperson’s perspective, he decided to take the responsibility for his body into his own hands. In consultation with his sympathetic physician because they realized they couldn’t really do anything more for him. He ended his medical treatments substituting controlled doses of a certain ascorbic acid then submitted himself to delightful humor therapy.
Moving from a hospital, he felt was not conducive to the restful atmosphere he needed, (all of us have been in hospital rooms know that they’re not restful). he relocated himself in a nearby hotel room, hired a nurse rented a projector, and comedy films and began to make a joyous discovery. Ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep. Wow. When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off we would switch on the motion picture projector and again and not infrequently it would lead to another pain-free sleep interval. Sometimes the nurse would read to me out of a trove of humor books.
David: Is that a wild?
Karen: Just one more paragraph. Despite the diagnosis that his condition was degenerative, each day Cousin’s sedimentation rate, which had been alarmingly elevated, was reduced until he was able to return to work and resume a normal lifestyle. He continued to improve in his physical strength and the symptoms of disease decreased. Do you remember that verse from Proverbs?
David: No, tell me what it was.
Karen: You remember it. “A cheerful heart is a good medicine,” says Proverbs 17:22. And indeed, I testify that it is.
David: A rather overlooked cure for the mouth disease is humor and especially the ability to laugh at yourself. I don’t know Karen, but I think if I ever come to the place where I can’t get cured through the medical profession, I can tell you the film I want to watch.
Karen: I think I know what it is.
David: Okay what would you say?
Karen: Well, I remember you laughing your head off when you were watching “What About Bob” with Bill Murray right?
David: Bill Murray, yeah, yeah. I can’t get through that film before I’m just you know crying with laughter is so funny. I don’t have any idea what you do. I know that you laugh a lot. I do know that again humor is something that’s a big part of our family. When the family gets together there’s a lot of laughter that goes on. All right I want also for you to quote Mark Twain. When do you quote Mark Twain in a religious setting?
Karen: I guess Mark Twain, an American humorist, wrote in Tom Sawyer, that was perhaps one of us most famous books, that an old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a man’s pocket because it cut down the doctor’s bills like everything is that great.
David: That’s really neat. Raymond Moody Jr. his book is called “Laugh After Laugh” about the benefits of laughter.
Karen: After giving a presentation on the topic of laughter he tells of a professional comedian who came up to him and said that on those occasions in which he had really made his audience laugh he had always told his wife “I killed them tonight.” Now after hearing Moody talk about the benefits of laughter he said he was going to tell her “I helped them to live.”
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