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When my youngest tells a lie, his tongue sticks straight out involuntarily. My wife and I have cracked the child-lying gene! We are going to become rich through this discovery. Parents around the world will rejoice! My son can marry into your family line and in time, we can wipe out childhood lying altogether!
We won’t divulge how we came about this scientific breakthrough, because we don’t need the competition, but I will say this: It involved eating a lot of chocolate truffles!
We’re calling it Pinocchi-Tongue.
“It was an athident!”’
“I alweady took a bath.”
And the bigger the lie, the more pronounced the condition.
Where is all the furniture that used to be in the living room?
“I hath now ithea. I’m thelling the thuth!”
I just hope he never lies near a frozen flagpole, or ever whispers me a lie. That would haunt me for days!
Next, my good buddy Wil Twynstra is calls in to discuss Suvivorman and complain about the number one reason men lose their manliness.
In the show Survivorman, outdoorsman and survival expert Les Stroud permits himself to be stranded for a week in a remote location with no equipment or supplies apart from his one-man camera rig, documenting his experience and providing insight into how to manage whatever hurdles the wilderness might throw at him. He basically faces the elements and eats whatever insects and tree bark he can find.
But, as Wil watches this show, all he can think is, “No phone, no computer… no kids banging on the bathroom door for a whole week? Where do I sign up?!”
What would really test Les Stroud’s survival skills is if he were to get dropped off in the middle of suburbia, in Wil’s minivan with no muffler. Then put him in the local grocery store with three kids, but without a single quarter for cart rental, and the grocery list that your wife texted has magically disappeared from his phone. It’d be great to see him wandering aimlessly through aisle four while one of the kids smashes a jar of pickles all over someone else’s groceries and clothing.
Survive that, Survivorman!
And, speaking of Wil’s minivan, he recently noticed some guys driving around on Harley Davidson motorcycles. They looked so cool. They were living the life. They even had a special wave they exchanged, as if they were part of some motorcycle riding brotherhood.
All Wil could think was, “I’m in a ten-year-old minivan. Minivan men don’t have that kind of a wave. First of all, there’s no respect given to minivan men. They don’t deserve any. The only greeting Wil exchanges with other minivan men are pathetic tears of lament as Dora the Explorer blasts through the speakers and the floor is littered with Happy Meal boxes.
Finally, the legendary Ken Davis joins the show to talk about the temporary rush of success versus making a difference in people’s lives.
As Ken puts it, the euphoric rush that a performer feels when an audience responds to what they are doing on stage is very, very temporary. But the rush of knowing that lives have been changed, and the stories of such that a performer receives via email and letters… this kind of rush lasts a lifetime!
Part of what Ken shares when he performs deals with “living fully alive, not giving up, and not coasting through life”. Through this message, he has touched people’s lives and has even convinced at least one man to face another day instead of taking his own life, as he was tempted to do before hearing Ken. As he puts it, if all he received for doing what he does was a paycheck and the rush of an audience’s laughter, he could retire. But, because he is out there changing lives, he can’t give it up.
Good humor is the gentle way to acknowledge human frailty. And so, in this regard, humor is a way of looking at your life, what’s wrong with it, what you’re in the midst of, and saying, “I’m not okay and I don’t have it all together… but that’s okay. Because God loves me anyway”.
From this, we can see that some things in life are just too difficult to handle head-on. But, these same trials can be made easier with a cushion of humor.
For instance, Ken recently learned about a lady who was sitting in the first row of his show. She is a nurse and had lost two of her patients that day at the hospital before coming to see Ken’s show. Understandably, she really wasn’t in any mood to go out and see a comic. But, she came out anyway and left that night with a heart full of gratitude. She met Ken afterward and told him that it is so difficult sometimes, especially when she feels helpless to help people. But, hearing Ken helped put everything into perspective.