Mark Rogers

I guess of all the items of life that have served me well over the years, I would have to say that a sense of humor has served me best. The kind of attitude that thinks, “Well this may be bad, but at least it’ll make for a good story.” And because I have that kind of sense of humor, I have to have friends who can take it which means they pretty much have to have the same kind of thought processes.

Recently, a friend of mine and I were on our way back from a fishing trip. We were in his vehicle pulling his boat, when all of a sudden the suv gave a jerk, a thump and then went dead, just coasting down the highway. And the realization that we had run out of gas clouded my friend’s face. Fortunately we found a convenient place to coast to a stop on, and got out of the vehicle to determine what to do next on the edge of a small town so little there was no gas station.

It didn’t take us long to figure out that while we didn’t have any gas in the suv, we had plenty in the boat. So with the use of a small ice chest, the bulb and gas line on the boat, and a bottle cut for a funnel, we managed to siphon enough gas out of the boat to make it to the next town. Standing on the side of the road, we were ghetto supreme, one of us pouring gas out of an ice chest while the other held a cut out plastic bottle to get some of the gas in the tank while a good deal of it splashed out on the side of the road. And of course the humiliation of knowing it was being seen by the hundred or so cars that passed while this process took place. We continued down the road with several more issues arising because these type situations don’t get better, they build. But in all of it, we stayed upbeat, laughing and made the best of it. And predictably all of it made a good story.

My last post detailed my disastrous fishing trip with my kayak overturning. But when all of it was over, the first thing I did was give a vague and humorous account of it on Facebook to let everybody have fun with, which they did. The few sour responses I got were no doubt from good people, but people that I probably would not do well trying to run around with. Predictably, the first one that laughed at me online was the guy in the running out of gas story above. That’s the reason he’s my friend, because he understands humor under adverse conditions whether it’s his own mishaps or somebody else’s.

A little over 20 years ago, a business that I had worked for 8 years, began to bring family members in and replacing tenured employees. I knew getting dumped was inevitable. The manager of the business had become a friend of mine and in the course of our conversation, I said, I’m fired aren’t I? He hung his head and nodded, though I had wrung it out of him before it was time to replace me and before anyone was ready to fill my position. So, I asked when it was supposed to happen, told him I would just keep going until that time, and we went to lunch together. I looked at him at lunch, addressed him by name and asked, “So when’s the last time you fired somebody then went to lunch with them?” Tension broken, stress relieved and it all became a big joke. And I obviously survived and thrived without the job becoming self employed for the next 13 years.

If you have issues with non clinical depression, see every negative as a defeat, or if you just have a rotten personality, the Bible, like it does for most other life issues, gives us a remedy in Proverbs 17:22 “A joyful heart is good medicine, But a broken spirit dries up the bones.”

So, if you find yourself in a position in life where you just feel rotten about everything, you’ve undergone some kind of life setback, or you just know nobody likes you, try to muster up a little humor. It will do wonders for your attitude, improve your face, and fix your relationships.

Try it God’s way. You’ll like it.

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