A friend of mine recently told me how he met his wife. He had watched her walk by his store every day for a year, with her young son. She also happened to be a friend of his neighbor.

“Fix me up,” he suggested to his neighbor. “We’ll go on a double date. I really want to meet her.” Unfortunately, the neighbor never got around to setting up that first date.

Finally my friend devised a plan. Every day when she walked by the store, they said hello to each other, but she never stopped to chat. This day, he was ready. He had his store keys in hand. “Would it be all right if I walked with you for a while?” he asked when she walked by.

“Don’t you have to mind your store?”

“I’ll lock it up,” he said.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “We can sit here and chat.”

That Friday, they had their first date. She was nervous.

The next weekend, they went out again. She was still nervous. He turned to her. “You can relax,” he said. “I’m not going to try anything inappropriate. I just want to enjoy your company.” As time passed, she did relax, and they continued to become friends. Three years later, they were married in a small ceremony “I didn’t want to over­whelm her son,” my friend recalled.

He wrote his wedding vows. He promised to love her and care for her all of his life. He promised to love her son and protect him, as if he were his own. She lit up his life, he said, and he was grateful for her promise of compan­ionship for the rest of their lives.

My friend is a lucky man, but not just because he found someone he truly loves. He is lucky because he is able to recognize the gift of his wife’s love. Most of us have the ability to see when we have been harmed, hurt, or slighted, when we’re not loved or treated the way we’d like

to be. But we can learn to see those acts – big and small – when someone shows us love. They are the greatest gifts of all.

Value: Call it believing we deserve love, lovability, or love-ability, the value for this week is opening our eyes and hearts so we can see and receive love from others—friends, family, romantic involvements, and God.

Sometimes people don’t get our one-liners. Sometimes they do and just frown with a disapproving look that makes us cringe. Sometimes we laugh at the wrong time or wrong place. But please don’t stop laughing. We need all the help we can get to remember to laugh and to smile. Sometimes, when I go to sleep at night, I swear I hear cherubs giggling.

Prayer: Please grant me a sense of humor. Send me something or someone special to make me smile.

People who make us laugh are bright spots in our lives.

Gratitude Focus: We can be grateful for the people who help us laugh.

What makes you laugh? I love slapstick humor and really dumb stuff, like the Ernest movies, when he kept getting marker all over his face while on jury duty. The harder he would try to stop doing it, the more marker he would get on himself.

People who have a sense of humor about their flaws and mistakes make me laugh. “I know there’s a value in every relationship we’ve been in. And I can see the value in most of mine – even the worst,” a friend explained.”But that particular one, hard as I try, I just can’t find the value, unless it’s ‘Don’t be with someone who repulses you.’” What tickles you?

Action: Who in your life makes you laugh? Enjoy them. What movies and TV shows make you laugh? Watch them. What books, radio shows, or jokes lighten you? Don’t go to sleep at night until you’ve had at least one good laugh each day. If you can’t find anything funny right now in your life, let yourself remember a time or experience that was funny

Is laughter a regular part of your emotional diet?

Inventory Focus: Are you going through such a tough, intense, or challenging situation right now that you’re forgetting to laugh? Are you telling yourself your situa­tion is so glum that it would be disrespectful to indulge in laughter? Maybe it’s exactly what you and the people around you need. There are times when it’s inappropriate and disrespectful to laugh, but don’t let those times go on too long. We can develop a sense of humor and a sense of timing.

Go ahead. Have a good laugh.

Challenge: See? Nothing about laughing is hard.

I went to see a therapist a few months after my son’s death. He listened to my story and carefully explained how the grieving process would take time, and how I wasn’t going to feel happy or even comfortable for a while.

He explained there wasn’t a lot I could do to change my situation, speed things up, or dull the pain.

“But there’s one thing that’s crucial,” he said.”And you must start doing it right away.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Remember the law of humor,” he said. “Remember to let yourself laugh.”

We don’t want to make fun of other people’s circum­stances. We don’t want to mask pain with false laughter. But no matter what circumstance we’re going through, laughter isn’t just optional. It’s essential. Humor is a law.

Application: Whenever we can’t remember the last time we laughed, it’s time to do it.

I walked out the bakery door holding my crescent and coffee. I looked down. On the sidewalk lay a large dog. He was on his back, motionless. A crowd ofpeople was gather­ing around and staring.

“Oh my God,” I said.

A man walked up to me. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Haven’t you ever seen a dead dog before?”

I was horrified.Then I saw the glimmer of a smile on the man’s face. I looked more closely. This is Los Angeles. Even dogs want to be actors. The owner had told the dog to play dead instead of sit while he was in the bakery. I chuckled and then walked to my car.

I first learned about the value of laughter the year after I got out of treatment for my chemical dependency. I had a job working for a law firm in a small town. I was so frightened—of life, of myself, of whether I could stay sober. I didn’t talk much those days. I was all bound up inside of myself.

I spent a lot of time working alongside a pretty woman in her late twenties, a paralegal in the firm. Often our tasks consisted of rather repetitive, unexciting chores. Mailing, filing, organizing massive stacks of correspondence and

legal documents for real estate transactions, and typing wills. This was in the old days, before electric typewriters, before computers. Wills had to be typed perfectly; we couldn’t use correction fluid or erasers. It wasn’t uncom­mon to get to the last line of the page and snake a mistake.

There was nothing particularly exciting happening in my world as I struggled to learn the early disciplines of staying sober and being responsible. What I remember most was working alongside this woman, and her ability to laugh at herself, at her tasks, at the sometimes gruesome and boring nature of life. I hadn’t been around anyone with a sense of humor. To this day, I don’t think she knows how much she affected me and how much she taught me. I can’t even remember her name, but I remember the lesson. She taught me to laugh.

Laughter takes the pressure off and lightens the load. We can actually feel our body and our chemistry change when the corners of the mouth turn upward toward the heavens in a smile.

Value: Whether it’s a slight chuckle from deadpan humor or a laugh that makes your belly ache and tears stream down your face, laughter is the value for this week.

Guests come and go at the Blue Sky Lodge. Sometimes a sky diver comes to the drop zone for the weekend from a nearby town and needs a place to shower and sleep for one evening. Often, people come from around the world to train and jump at Skydive Elsinore, and it is a particular pleasure to offer our international friends a bed, showers, and the amenities of the Lodge.

Martin was one such guest.

After spending years in the military, he decided to have some fun with what he had learned. He now recruits skydiv­ing trainees from the United Kingdom and plans training excursions at Lake Elsinore, staying for several weeks at a time. He frequently brings his wife with him, but occasionally comes here alone. On one such solo visit, we invited him to stay at the Blue Sky Lodge and were thrilled when he accepted our invitation.

All Blue Sky Lodge guests are told the same thing: Make yourself at home. The pool, hot tub, miniature golf course, DVD player, stereo, showers, food, beverages, books, prayer room, stunning mountain view, musical instruments, and contents of the refrigerator are here for your enjoyment. Help yourself!

“Martin was a good guest,” Chip commented recently. “He swam, used the hot tub, ran, and sat outside and enjoyed the view.”

I agreed. It gave us both pleasure to see Martin make him­self at home and enjoy the gifts the Lodge has to offer. He was respectful and grateful—a delightful humble air—but he was also confident, and confidently enjoyed the pleasures and gifts available and offered to him.

What kind of a guest are you? Are you making yourself at home on this planet, whatever the circumstances you find yourself in? Are you taking delight and pleasure in the gifts and moments available to you, each day? Or are you sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a straight-backed chair, won­dering if it’s okay to help yourself?

We each have different gifts and pleasures available to us at any given time in our lives. Sometimes, we have to look to see what these gifts are. The pleasures may be as simple as a view of an old oak tree from our kitchen window, a big bath tub that fills up with hot water and comforts our body and soul, or a walk around the city block surrounding the apart­ment we rent.

Sometimes, the best way to say thanks is to simply enjoy with humble confidence the gifts and pleasures that are offered to us today.

Are you a good guest? Make yourself at home. It’s your world, too.

God, teach me how to enjoy and savor the pleasures, gifts, and tal­ents that are spread out before me. Help me learn to make myself at home, wherever I find myself today.

I was flying the airplane one day, practicing my turns, when I turned to my instructor, Rob. “Something doesn’t feel quite right to me,” I said. “The horizon looks a little bit off.”

“That’s because you’ve got us in a graveyard spiral,” he said. “If you keep going like this, well keep spiraling faster and faster until we lose control and crash into the ground.”

“Aaaah!” I said. “You’ve got the controls. Get us out of this mess.”

The spiral had just begun. Rob easily restored the plane to coordinated flight, with a slight twist of his wrist. I was greatly relieved.

Sometimes in life, we can get a little complacent. We begin grumbling about a few little things. We start seeing the nega­tive things about our jobs, our families, our romantic rela­tionships, our friends. Or we get weary and tired of being alone, and not being able to meet anyone we want to date. Maybe nothing is really wrong in our career, but it just isn’t giving us the pizzazz we’d prefer. So we start grumbling and complaining about how bad it is. We see other people mak­ing more money than we are, getting better breaks, and doing something that looks like more fun to us. It’s not that anything is wrong; it’s just that things don’t seem good enough.

Than we find more things that irritate us about our friends, our co-workers, and our boss. Soon, most of what we see looks depressing and wrong. The negative is accentuated in everything we see.

That’s a good indication that we’re in a graveyard spiral, too.

Some people in this world need a special technique to get peacefully, joyfully, and harmoniously through their lives. I’m not saying this applies to everyone, but I know it applies to me. Every day in my life, I need to deliberately, consciously apply large doses of gratitude to everything I see.

Look! If instead of seeing the beautiful horizon or the clouds, all you can see is down, apply gratitude and humility to each aspect of your life. In a few moments, you’ll restore yourself to coordinated flight.

God, help me use the powerful remedy of gratitude as a tool for daily transformation in my life.