Pastoral Pearls: Smile
Use your smile to change the world but don’t let the world change your smile.~ Unknown
Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. ~ Mother Teresa
Peace begins with a smile. ~ Mother Teresa
This Friday is World SMILE Day! That sounds fun! One of my favorite things to do is to smile. It brings me joy. It changes my mood to one of peace or joy. It doesn’t just touch just my mouth, but also my eyes and cheeks. I love to smile at people I don’t know to see if they will smile back. It’s not a given. Some people don’t know what to do with it. But for many people it is contagious. I know that when someone smiles at me, I can hardly help but start smiling too.
Smiling is fairly easy to do when things are going my way. Smiling is a bit harder to do when I may be angry, or sad, or frustrated. If I smile, that means I am letting go of my mad, my sad, my poor-me, and I’ve earned my mad! But, if I give in and try a smile, it does start to erode those negative feelings.
Smiling has such a clear connection with my Christian faith. If God is love, and a smile is the beginning of love, there you go. I am now compelled to smile as one way to live out my faith. My favorite image of Jesus – maybe you’ve seen it – is the Laughing Jesus. I do believe that Jesus has a sense of humor (thank goodness) and that He smiles at me all the time, trying to coax a smile out of me. I feel it, inside.
And then there’s peace, something our world desperately needs right now. I always seem to get overwhelmed trying to think of how I am supposed to try to overcome violence and create peace. That just seems way too big for me. But now, I can work toward peace by using something I’m already good at – smiling. Now that I can do! So I guess I can help create peace in our world! Just to think – my smile could change the world. Wow! I’d like to do that.
Happy World Smile Day on Friday! I think we should practice our smiles all week! Then by Friday they’ll be ready to go for us to change the world with God’s love and peace. I’ll look for your powerful smile.
Loving God,
thank you for the gift of the smile.
Inspire me to know when, where and how to use this God-given gift to make others around me sparkle from the inside, starting a chain reaction of light and love.
~ Amen