Jes Jokin’

December 17, 2020 by  
Filed under Humor, Stories

By Stephanie Prichard –

“Knock, knock.” My five-year-old granddaughter grinned in anticipation.

Oh boy. I didn’t know she’d entered the torture-through-humor years. “Who’s there?”

“Interrupting chicken.”

“Interrupting chicken who?

She frowned. “Wait. Let’s start over. Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Interrupting chicken.”

“Interrupting chicken who?”

“Buh-katt,” she shrieked, in a pretty convincing imitation of a shrieking chicken. “Wait, Grandma!” Tears sprang to her eyes. “You went too fast.”

“Sorry, Ella. Let’s start over.”

She gulped back her disappointment. “Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Interrupting chicken.”

”In—ter—rup—ting—Chi—”

“Buh-katt!” The piercing shriek segued into cackles of laughter.

“Ella, that’s funny!” I hardy-har-harred it up with her.

“Let’s do it again, Grandma! Knock, knock.”

Oh boy.

The delight of humor begins in infancy. Think of the giggles that respond to Peek-A-Boo. The surprise of boo! is the same surprise of the punch-line of a joke. The unexpected evokes laughter. Or, put another way, the abnormal juxtaposed on the normal tickles our funny bone.

That’s why Sarah laughed in Genesis 18:12 when the Lord announced that she, at age ninety, would have a son. “Therefore, Sarah laughed within herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?’” Getting pregnant, juxtaposed on the fact that she was way past her childbearing years, had to be a joke! When Isaac, whose name means “laughter,” was born, Sarah said, “God has made me laugh, and all who hear will laugh with me. Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children?” We are invited to giggle with her at this marvelous contradiction of normal childbearing.

Scripture shows God in several instances laughing in derision. In Psalm 2, “Rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying ‘Let us break Their bonds in pieces and cast away Their cords from us.’ He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall hold them in derision.” Laughable, indeed, to see man’s might juxtaposed on God’s!

Sixty-nine lines in Job 41 describe God’s awesome creature, the Leviathan. “Shall one not be overwhelmed at the sight of him? No one is so fierce that he would dare stir him up.” Nevertheless, sword, spear, javelin, dart, arrow and slingstone are flung at him. Place these paltry weapons next to the Leviathan’s airtight scales of armor, and in verse 29 you find “he laughs at the threat.”

It’s not mockery or derision that creates humor—it’s the juxtaposition of the abnormal on the normal. Unlike the Leviathan, though, we aren’t covered with a hide of armor. We can hurt and be hurt when humor is used as a weapon. But, properly used, humor pleases God. A merry heart, Proverbs tells us, “makes a cheerful countenance,” “has a continual feast” and “does good, like medicine.”

So, here you go, more clucking chickens to make your heart merry:

A pair of chickens walks up to the circulation desk at a public library and say, “Buk Buk BUK.” The librarian decides the chickens want three books, so gives them three.

Around midday, the two chickens come back, quite vexed, and say, “Buk Buk BukKOOK!” The librarian gives them another three books.

Later in the afternoon, the two chickens return, looking very annoyed, and say, “Buk Buk Buk BukKOOOOK!” Suspicious now, the librarian gives them several more books and decides to follow them.

She follows them out of the library, into a park and down to a pond. Hiding behind a tree, she gasps as the two chickens throw the books at a frog. They cackle in fury when he says, “Rrredit. Rrredit. Rrredit.”

Pleeeeze, Not Ice!

September 21, 2020 by  
Filed under Humor, Stories

By Steph Prichard –

Because I’m somewhat expressive (I say “imaginative,” my children say “drama queen”), I occasionally lack credibility with my offspring. Take the time I was in Chicago helping my daughter recover from surgery. Every day I walked my grandchildren to and from school, loving the stroll with them between rows of condos on a street bustling with traffic. A right-hand turn down a quieter, tree-lined street led to the school.

It was that quieter (read “deserted”) street that caught my imagination when the sidewalks turned into sheets of ice the very hour I needed to get the kids. “I can just see myself falling and breaking my leg,” I told my daughter. “I’ll be lying there, unable to move, and along will come some man. ‘Can I help you?’ he’ll say, and when I tell him I can’t move he’ll wring his hands in delight and go ‘Mwhooohooohooohaha!’” I paused at my daughter’s rolling eyeballs.

“It’s your last day here, Mom. The kids will be disappointed if you don’t walk them home.” She handed me a scarf and mittens and pushed me out the door. Well, it felt like she did, anyway.

Hoo, were those sidewalks slick! Barely maintaining my balance, I slipped and slid and skidded ten steps forward, heart thumping, sweat gushing from my armpits. Dare I crawl on my hands and knees? If I could make it to the corner, maybe someone would help me stand and cross the street. But what if no one was there? I’d have to crawl across the street in front of the stopped traffic, and they’d all laugh at me. We drama queens do have our limits, you know.

I eyed the patches of lawn between the sidewalk and condos. Well, duh, why not walk on the grass? The blades, though glazed with ice, would provide texture to tread on. With a sigh of relief, I stepped onto the frozen grass.

And fell.

Yep. Onto the hard sidewalk. With my foot twisted under me. And I couldn’t move.

“Can I help you?” A man appeared out of nowhere.

As if following my own script, I said, “I can’t move.”

I stiffened, waiting for the “Mwhooohooohooohaha!” Instead, he pulled out his cell phone and asked, “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

“Please! And can you call my daughter too?”

Within minutes, she was skidding across the winter wonderland to kneel beside me. Tears spilled from her eyes. “Mom, I’m so sorry!”

How could I say “I told you so” to that?

An ambulance ride and five hours in the emergency room later, I learned I had broken my ankle. Ouch. The very circumstance I had feared … had come true.

That little drama effected a mighty change in me.

I was a coward, and I had ended up in exactly the situation I was afraid of. What if, instead of squaring off my anxiety against circumstances (pleeeeze, not ice!), I had addressed my character deficiency (I need to be brave)? Until this incident, my prayers for myself and others had pretty much asked for avoidance of any kind of suffering. Please, heal his cancer … give her a happy marriage … don’t let him lose his job. My prayers spoke only to circumstances, not to character transformations. Now I pray, Please, may he trust in Your plan for his life … may she learn to forgive her husband … may he see his shortcomings at work. We don’t know if it’s God’s will to change a circumstance, but for sure we know it’s His will for us to grow in godliness.

Healthy, Healthy Chocolate

August 6, 2020 by  
Filed under Humor, Stories

By Steph Prichard –

At last, science has acknowledged what the rest of us knew all along—that chocolate is good for you. Okay, so the verdict was limited to dark chocolate—we chocoholics can live with that. And what finally pushed the men with pointy heads to that waking point? They discovered little thingies called antioxidants living in dark chocolate, and—guess what?—these antioxidants have their own addictions! They gobble up bad cells called “free radicals” as greedily as, well, we devour a box of chocolates.

The free radicals start out as terrorists that use oxygen to parachute into our bodies and blast our cells with machine guns. The cells, lop-sided now because they lack a crucial molecule, go absolutely whack-o. Foaming at the mouth, they take off on a rampage and beat up healthy cells to steal molecules from them. Then those poor, robbed cells run amok and bushwhack other cells to steal their molecules. And so it goes, blam, blam, blam, one big chain reaction of hold-up after hold-up. The result? Ugh—disease.

All for lack of antioxidant-good-guys.

So, motivated by the desire to be dark-chocolate healthy, I cruised the grocery aisles. Candy bars, chocolate chips, cocoa, ice cream bars—if it said dark chocolate, I bought it. And ate it. My favorite antioxidant host became the ice cream bars that were dark chocolate, inside and out. For dessert every night, I faithfully ate one. I decided to become even more faithful and eat one for dessert at lunchtime too. And if one is good and two are better, why not add a third one for an afternoon snack and have triple the health?

I noticed I was gaining weight, but what’s a pound or two when the gain is in health too? At five pounds, I thought a bit of restraint might be in order, but you know what the –holic means at the end of the choco-? Uh-huh. The antioxidants and I were hooked. Totally addicted to chocolate and free radicals. Sadly, but with great resolve, we decided to bite the bullet and cut back on everything dark chocolate but the ice cream bars.

At ten pounds, when I had to shop for clothes a size larger, reality in the form of a humanoid blob stared back at me from the fitting room mirror. I sniffled, knowing I had to make a choice. It was either another month and another size larger, or go cold turkey and quit. I exchanged my dark chocolate for turkey.

What took one month to gain took three months to lose. Ever since, I have shunned dark chocolate and made friends with the antioxidants inhabiting the fifty-two calories of a raw apple. You’ve never heard of an appleholic, have you? There’s a good reason why.

But, hey, not all cravings are bad! There’s one I’ve gained exponentially from, every bit of it to my benefit. When I became a Christian at age twenty, I began reading the Bible, sometimes in bite-sized pieces, sometimes in full-plate portions. The more I read, the more I gained wisdom for my marriage, my parenting, and every decision I faced, big or small. What could be better than insight straight from the God who made me and loves me? Psalm 119:103 says, “How sweet are Your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” Hoo, now there’s an addiction worth indulging in!

Say What?

July 20, 2020 by  
Filed under Humor, Stories

By Steph Prichard –

Mumble, mumble, mumble.

“W-h-a-a-t?” I clicked Save and trudged from my bedroom office to the top of the stairs. “Did you say something?”

Mumble, mumble, mumble.

I trekked down the stairs, through the living room, and into my husband’s dining-room-converted-into-an-office. “What’d you say?”

He answered. I answered. Back upstairs to my computer.

Mumble, mumble, mumble.

“Wha-a-a-t?”

Mumble, mumble, mumble.

Uh-huh, you guessed it—back downstairs again. Grace ebbed with each step until, on my fourth trip, I suggested what clearly was more than a recommendation. “From now on, how about if we have the rule that we meet at the stairs to talk?”

Agreement. An hour passed, then mumble, mumble, mumble.

I stomped out of my room. What part of “meet at the stairs” did the man not understand? “Wha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-t,” I yelled, my protracted vowel definitely not coated with shugah.

Oh my. At the bottom of the stairs, already waiting, stood my husband. My jaw dropped, and heat pinched my cheeks as he grinned up at me. “Maybe we need the rule,” he said, “that we see the whites of each other’s eyes before we talk.”

Or, face it, I needed a hearing aid.

“Why wait until you’re old and gnarled to hear better?” a friend asked. Why indeed? I was missing out on half the content of conversations directed to me. As if listening to a skipping tape recorder, I had to piece words together to catch the gist of what was said. Worse, my daughter spoke softly—I heard maybe twenty percent of what she said—and she allowed me only two whats. And then there were my friends who teased me by muttering juicy tidbits just loud enough that I couldn’t quite catch what they said. Meanies.

Why put up with this? I bought a hearing aid for each ear, and, yessssss, finally, I could hear!

Reminds me of how we need spiritual hearing aids too. Before I became a Christian, I read the Bible … and thought it horrid. I listened to sermons … and the words went in one ear and zipped out the other. Scripture by itself, whether read or listened to, is not a hearing aid to God’s Truth. First Corinthians 2:14 says, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” Yep, nailed me!

Once we are Christians, however, the Holy Spirit opens our ears to hear and our minds to understand the Truth that God reveals in Scripture. That’s when we can meet with Him at the stairs and talk. “‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord.” Oh yeah, that’s an invitation I don’t want to miss out on!

Bald-Headed Babes

May 12, 2020 by  
Filed under Humor, Stories

By Steph Prichard –

The taillights of the car ahead of me suddenly flashed red. Ahhh, clever me for maintaining that traffic-manual-safe-space between us! I braked to a successful stop inches from the car’s bumper. Not so the guy behind me. Wham. My head lurched forward, then back, then a second time as I rammed the car in front of me after all.

The guy who had now upped my insurance premium got out of his car and hastened to the passenger side of mine. As I rolled down the window, his mouth fell open and his eyes widened. What? Did I look like I was going to bite off his head?

He swallowed hard. “I w-wanted to make sure you’re all right. Do you need anything? I’ve called in the accident.”

Aw, what a nice guy. Sorta. I assured him I was okay, and he sped to the car in front of me to check on its driver.

Traffic on the left slowed to a crawl so that passengers could stare into our three-car zoo. Not one to spurn an on-stage appearance, I hammed it up. I smiled, waved, held my hands palms up and shrugged my shoulders. I got the same mouth-gaping, eye-widening response the young driver had given me.

I decided I’d better look in the mirror. Oh my. My head was as bald as a boiled egg. I had literally flipped my wig into the back seat. I reached back and retrieved my, ahem, hair, put it on, and got out of the car. This would definitely go to the top of my Most Embarrassed Moment list. At least I could explain to the young driver that I was receiving chemo treatments and had lost my hair. But all those spectators driving by? Bwahaha, no wonder they had looked stunned. Some bald-headed babe was making quite a fool of herself!

Bald-headed babies are cute, though, aren’t they? And isn’t this the season for The Babe? To the world, the little guy in the manger is a comforting image. What would they think if they looked at what He “grew up” to be? Here’s how Jesus is described in Revelation 19:12-16: “His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns…. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The
Word of God.…  Now out of His mouth goes a sharp sword, that with it He should strike the nations.… He Himself treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. And He has on His
robe and on His thigh a name written: King of kings and Lord of lords.”

Ouch. The cuddling factor is definitely gone.

For Christians, the babe in the manger is the long-awaited seed promised in Genesis 3:15.  But we recognize that what we celebrate at Christmas is only the beginning of the fulfillment. The King of kings and Lord of lords is coming again, and next time it won’t be as a bald-headed babe.

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