Laugh, Sing, and Get Some Fresh Air! It’s Respiratory Month!

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Welcome to July, and Happy Independence Day to my American friends! This is respiratory month!

If you need to do anything after the past two years, BREATHE! Take that mask off! Gather with family and friends and coworkers and fellow volunteers, and BREATHE!

No, don’t engage in the controlled breathing that can open you up to demonic influences, although I know those who claim to be Christians in the life coaching space who teach this.  See my spiritual warfare page for why such things are harmful.

But just enjoy the fresh air. Take in a deep breath and sing your anthem with gusto! By the way, singing is one effective way to assist the lungs in clearing, because you have to breathe down into the lower lobes rather than keep your air up in the upper lobes as most people do most of the time. Laughter is another way to clear the lungs, although you might think that last joke is going to kill you, you have to admit, it made you cough up all that phlegm and your lungs do feel better for it!

Psalm 126:2 Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The LORD hath done great things for them.

Proverbs 15:13 A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken

Proverbs 15:15 All the days of the afflicted are evil: but he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast.

Proverbs 17:22 A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.

Proverbs 17:22 is often interpreted that laughter doeth good like a medicine. False religions jumped on that and one sect of Buddhists teach that laughter is a spiritual ritual and one of their statues is called “the laughing Buddha”. Due to the previous verse referring to a froward heart, this definition of “merry” is easily understood, along with the fact that persistent sorrow as the KJV puts it, or sadness/depression/melancholy can indeed negatively affect our physical health. But Proverbs 17:22 isn’t just about laughter. At the time the KJV was written, the word “merry” referred to a pleasant state of mind in the song, “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” (they used both you and ye in colloqual English even back then, depending on who was doing the writing/speaking, and what level of court they held). Dictionaries from that time and forward to now, often include the concept of laughter or joviality, so hence why some translations use the word laughter for the word merry in this verse.

If you read God’s Word with a less solemn mind, there are many times when you can clearly see God’s own sense of humour in how He named things, the word plays He used (more easily seen in the Hebrew, but still visible at times in English), and you discover that His humour is clean, family-friendly, intellectually punny (the puns are in the definitions of the words more often than not, my son loves this type of punning!) and even at times what my daughter would call “guillotine humour”. In the Psalms, David writes that God holds the evil-doers in derision and laughs at them, before meting out judgement.

Psalms 2:2-5 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

Psalms 59:3-8 Thou therefore, O LORD God of hosts, the God of Israel, awake to visit all the heathen: be not merciful to any wicked transgressors. Selah. They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city. Behold, they belch out with their mouth: swords are in their lips: for who, say they, doth hear? But thou, O LORD, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the heathen in derision.

So laugh today! Even if it’s at the crazy goings-on that so many have still blindly bought into! Sing! Sing your anthem! Sing your favourite worship hymns and choruses! Reword songs to fit how you’ve been feeling and what you’ve been observing! Even my daughter’s horse now, after owning her for 7+years, will get a droll, sometimes silly look on her face when I start rewording songs around her. “There goes Mom again” Ashley calls me Mom around her even though the horse is Ashley’s, so that’s the name the horse knows me by. Our now deceased cat used to find various things hilarious and if cats could laugh, he would have rolled over and “died” on many occasions laughing so hard.

Did you know that in Scripture, God actually commanded His people to be joyful and engage in mirth on a number of occasions??? God commands joy! Joy is not happiness! Happiness is the state of having, and way back in an old Anglo-Saxon dictionary my daughter has downloaded, Hap means “to have, or having”. It is a state of having-ness, so if you don’t have, and having is necessary to put a smile on your face, then you are lacking happiness, and when you do have and having did put a smile on your face, you are now happy. Happiness is conditional on our circumstances. Joy is not! God commanded the Jews to be joyful on various occasions when they’d just been weeping and life had struck them very hard. We are told that the Joy of the Lord is our strength!

Psalms 5:8-11 Lead me, O LORD, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies; make thy way straight before my face. For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue. Destroy thou them, O God; let them fall by their own counsels; cast them out in the multitude of their transgressions; for they have rebelled against thee. But let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice: let them ever shout for joy, because thou defendest them: let them also that love thy name be joyful in thee.

Ecclesiastes 7:10-14 Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this. Wisdom is good with an inheritance: and by it there is profit to them that see the sun. For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it. Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: God also hath set the one over against the other, to the end that man should find nothing after him.

Isaiah 49:13-17 Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into singing, O mountains: for the LORD hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted. But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. Thy children shall make haste; thy destroyers and they that made thee waste shall go forth of thee.

II Corinthians 7:4-7 Great is my boldness of speech toward you, great is my glorying of you: I am filled with comfort, I am exceeding joyful in all our tribulation. For, when we were come into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest, but we were troubled on every side; without were fightings, within were fears. Nevertheless God, that comforteth those that are cast down, comforted us by the coming of Titus; And not by his coming only, but by the consolation wherewith he was comforted in you, when he told us your earnest desire, your mourning, your fervent mind toward me; so that I rejoiced the more.

I’m talking to myself now as well as to you here, because Joy has been hard to come by over the past 2.5yrs. Between government and mainstream medical mandates that cause more harm than they prevent, to churches capitulating with those mandates and isolating their own adherents, to businesses shutting down or losing customers and having trouble hiring people back because no one knows if there will be another lockdown (one could come in the fall, be warned). . . with threats of grocery stores banning the unvaxxed, etc, then watching the vaxxed start dropping on stages and sports fields, in swimming pools and behind the wheel, as fatal side effects begin to set in. It’s been hard to find joy.

I’ve found joy in going to the barn, laughing with my kids around stuff at home, and going foraging!

There will be a foraging workshop offered July 16th and at this point, it will be pre-recorded as I want to do most of the recording out in some of the places where we forage where I live. There is no wifi out there, and as my camera phone requires wifi to connect to the Internet, I can’t be out there and record live, sad to say. But it will be available July 16th for the usual workshop price of $20, and there will be a few handouts as well.

Foraging does several things all at once:

1) It gets you outside into the fresh air, more or less away from traffic and harmful industrial emissions.

2) It gives you exercise from walking to climbing over logs, to squatting to bending over and straightening up again.

3) It teaches you a renewed appreciation for what God has planted around you and the more you get into it, the more you want to behave in the typical husbandry manner and look after those plants, helping the struggling plants scatter their seeds, thinning those that are growing too tightly against each other (and some of those plants will visibly appear to appreciate this too!)

4) and it puts food, herbs and medicine into your bags to bring home, process, and use around the kitchen and the rest of the house.

I’ll be discussing these points and a number of others in The Foraging Workshop, on July 16th!

But today, July 4th, laugh, sing, and get some fresh air!

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