If You Can’t Laugh At Yourself…

When I was in college, I valued cost over quality when it came to food. With a monthly income that left almost nothing left over after rent, electric bill, gas, food, I had to pick carefully what I ate.

And I don’t mean I shopped at Whole Foods.

More like the waaayyy cheaper (in every sense of the word) grocery store, Big 8.

Right? With a name like Big 8, you are probably right on in what you are imagining.

Anyways, it was one afternoon when I was with some of my youth ministry friends (including the one I was secretly in love with, who married me several years later) on our way back to someones house for the afternoon to watch a movie and eat supper.

We all had gotten various food stuff to make whatever it was we were cooking. My part was chicken fingers. Yup, and not the good kind. I was getting the 12 pack of cafeteria quality for $2.99. That’s how I rolled.

But on the way out, of course, I ran into a mom of one of the kids from youth group. She struck up a conversation with me about the upcoming lockin, or the youth retreat, or something like that.

It stretched what was going to be a fast chicken finger run into more like a 15 minute event.

Standing there in the checkout lane, my phone buzzed.

“Where are you? What happened” was the message.

Now, here is where some explanation may be required. There was no keyboard on my flip phone. Just the dialpad that I had to use predictive texting on.

So, I typed back, using T9 predictive text on my flip phone, that I got waylaid by a youth group mom in the store.

When I got back to the van, my friends were laughing quietly.

Even with an old school flip phone, it had autocorrected the message I sent.

I got way laid by a youth group mom.

Yup. Spacing that one word into two make a huge difference.

Thanks to my well refined sense of humor, I exploded with laughter. It was hilarious!

I have learned that being able to laugh at myself is one of the greatest things I can have. Through not taking myself so seriously, not sweating the small stuff, what happens in life often times is really funny!

The next time I do something that gets laughed at, I’m planning to join right in and laugh too.

Because laughing at myself means I literally always have an audience with me.

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P.S — What do you get when you cross the Atlantic with the Titanic?

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Halfway.

(I’m laughing as I write this, mostly just at myself with my dad-joke sense of humor. But I hope you laughed with/at me!)