Funny on the Inside

A long lost childhood friend e-mailed me this week. A gal who lived next door for a handful of my pre-teen years. We bummed around together a lot on hot summer days, playing board games, running barefoot, and dipping our toes in the pond behind her house.

My best memories of Ginny involve scarfing a bowl of freshly popped Jiffy Pop swimming in a whole stick of melted butter.

Mmm. Those were the days. No diets, no cares, no cholesterol counts.

Ginny's e-mail said she had recently run across a book called Too Blessed to be Stressed and loved it. She said she'd laughed out loud 3 times in the first 5 pages. Unprecedented. She just had to look me up to see if that Debora Mitchell Coty and I happened to be one and the same. Surely not, right?

I was the one LOLing when she wrote, "Maybe you were funny when we were young, but I don't remember it."

You know, I get that a lot. I guess I'm only funny on paper and not in person because more than once someone who interacts with me in the real world has expressed shock when they find out I write women's humor. Then they read one of my books and say things like, "No way. Wait. You did NOT write this."

Makes me wonder how people perceive me compared to how I perceive myself. Goofy stuff is always bouncing around in my head. I guess the craziness doesn't make it to my face or out my mouth as often as it should. Is there such a thing as a split-end personality?

It's so cool how Papa God starts preparing us for our life ministry from our earliest days.

He began molding me for my ministry when I was just a wee tyke by surrounding me with humor. Mama loved to laugh and make other people laugh (still does at 86) and Daddy was hilarious (and still is at 88) but nobody ever knew it because he was always drowned out by Mama. He was soft-spoken and very quiet around most folks, but at home he displayed a dry, wry wit that I absolutely adored.

He was smart and keen, and could turn a clever phrase better than anybody I've ever met. He was from Georgia (so was Mama) and routinely pronounced everything adorably weird: I peenched the eench worm on the beeeench when I went to wreench (rinse) my hands in the saynk (sink).

I had to become English-backwoods bilingual in order to understand most of my relatives.

My sister, two years older than me, would rather laugh than eat. During the whole of our growing-up years, when we weren't wrestling or fighting over shoes, we were laughing. There was always something to giggle about if you just looked for it.

Then I married Chuck when I was just a big child (age 20) and he is one funny, twisted soul, let me tell you. He still keeps me chuckling 37 years later.

So not surprisingly, I turned out to be a humorist. At least on the inside.

Take a minute and ponder ... what ministry has Papa been preparing you for your whole life? I'd love to hear from you BBFF!






 

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