{"id":64624,"date":"2020-10-25T01:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-25T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/life\/living-growing-reclaiming-the-power-of-silliness-started-with-a-squirrel\/"},"modified":"2020-10-25T01:30:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-25T09:30:00","slug":"living-growing-reclaiming-the-power-of-silliness-started-with-a-squirrel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/life\/living-growing-reclaiming-the-power-of-silliness-started-with-a-squirrel\/","title":{"rendered":"Living & Growing: Reclaiming the power of silliness started with a squirrel"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tari Stage-Harvey <\/strong><\/ins><\/p>\n

Naturally, a squirrel was to blame.<\/p>\n

Last week, a squirrel entered the Loop Substation and knocked out the electricity in Juneau and crashed the church computer.<\/p>\n

It was not pretty — for the church or the squirrel.<\/p>\n

Speaking of rodents, I kind of believed before this weekend that a computer ran by magic hamsters inside the little box. Or elves. I now know there are no magical creatures inside the box.<\/p>\n

Like many things in Juneau, computer repair can take a while and we need this computer, so I connected with a tech by phone. He talked me through making sure the old computer was truly dead and then came the brain surgery.<\/p>\n

At least that’s what it felt like to me. I’d never looked inside a computer and now I was disconnecting sacred wires and then reconnecting them so we could salvage something off the old hard drive.<\/p>\n

My new best friend and computer tech, Roy, talked me through almost four hours of computer repair. It was a little slow going trying to connect at the beginning, but once I looked inside the old machine trying to figure out what wasn’t working I said the most obvious thing, “Can I stick my hand in the fan?”<\/p>\n

Like any good computer tech, Roy asked, “Why would you do that?”<\/p>\n

And my brilliant response was “Because I want to see what happens.”<\/p>\n

He started laughing so I sang him the “Fan Song.”<\/p>\n

It goes like this:<\/p>\n

“Put your hand in the fan and you will lose a finger<\/p>\n

Put your foot in the fan and you will lose a toe<\/p>\n

Put your face in the fan and you will look at others differently<\/p>\n

Put your body in the fan and rearrange your anatomy.”<\/p>\n

Everything changes in a relationship once you laugh together. Humor has taken such a mean streak recently that I want to reclaim the power of silliness. One of my favorite quotes out of a book I read recently called “Raising a Rare Girl” was about the author’s husband:<\/p>\n

“(he) preached a sermon about the power of humor not just to ‘lighten the mood’ but to help a person transcend what Christian contemplatives call their ‘small self.’ For an instant a laughing person could let themselves go like a helium balloon, find themselves in the unfathomably spacious blue sky.”<\/p>\n

I won’t lie, the thought of spending hours with a computer tech and dealing with technology seemed like a circle of hell. It wasn’t a highlight of my life, but giggling makes everything a little more bearable and freer, especially when Roy asked every 15 minutes if I still had all my digits.<\/p>\n

• Tari Stage-Harvey is pastor of Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church.“Living Growing” is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Giggling makes everything a little more bearable and freer <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":64625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-64624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64624"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=64624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}