A famous guy once acquired a disease that the doctors thought was incurable. Many of his friends and family wrote him off as dead since they were told by the medical specialists that no one had come up with a cure for this particular disease.

How would you respond to finding out that you were soon to die? Instead of falling into depression, anger, or bitterness, the man decided to pray and treat himself with laughter. He remembered the verse of scripture that says, “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.’ (Proverbs 17:22).

This man decided to make it his business to laugh his troubles away. He hung around people who were joyful and positive. Whenever he got around people who were bitter, critical, and resentful, he would politely excuse himself and leave. Even though he was too weak to work, he spent his time reading stories of happy, triumphant, and jubilant individuals who had turned their personal tragedies into triumphs. He also rented movies that made him laugh.

“I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” he reported. “When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.”

After six months of an intensive effort to set his mind on the happy aspects of life, the doctors began to notice a miraculous cure in his body. The man’s name? Norman Cousins. Norman taught medical school at the University of California, training doctors on the benefits of laughter in medicine. He died in 1990, living much longer than his doctors ever predicted.

So what’s this have to do with children’s ministry leadership? Let’s all remember that we communicate more than just words to one another. We communicate with our lives, our smiles, our actions, and even our presence. This weekend remember the power of a smile. Children need your love and joyful spirit. Remember, God said to “Rejoice always, in everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” (I Thes. 5:16-18).