Finding Your Funny Again: Faith, Fitness, and the Power of Perspective
Life is always filled with ups and downs, but if there is one thing we can control, it is our sense of humor.
“God has a sense of humor,” my mom would always say.
After my father was murdered when I was three years old, my mom was left a widow raising four children on her own. It was our sense of humor, faith, and fitness that carried us through the roller coaster that followed: the closure of our family business, countless parole hearings, and the fear that the man who took my father’s life would one day walk free.
After serving only three years of a mandatory sentence, the man who murdered my father was headed home on a Greyhound bus from Deer Lodge back to our hometown of Billings, Montana.
My mom’s attorneys managed to get the bus turned around just hours before he arrived.
“He will never feel remorse,” many prison guards stated after watching him during his incarceration. While in prison, he built a business and later made millions after his release. Meanwhile, my mom held tightly to her faith to survive.
One winter day, she was driving back to Blue Creek, the home my father had built just a few years before his death. The roads were icy and snow-covered as she crossed the Yellowstone River bridge.
Earlier that day, a bill collector had shown up at her door and told her he didn’t give a f**k what happened to her husband—he wanted his money. This was despite her attorneys advising her not to pay anything.
Donations collected by the town to help our family mysteriously disappeared before they ever reached us. We had already moved from our beautiful country home into the city so Mom could be closer to work and not have to make the dangerous commute.
“I thought it would just be easier to end it,” she later told me.
She pressed harder on the gas pedal. The bridge was only a mile ahead. The roads were slick, and she was ready to veer off and end everything.
Until suddenly, a calmness came over her.
Then a still, small voice said:
“Barbara, it’s going to be okay.”
She eased off the pedal and arrived safely home.
My memories between the ages of three and six are foggy, but I still remember my dad playing guitar. I remember him saving me from my car seat during a terrifying thunderstorm. I remember him opening the bathroom door when I accidentally locked myself inside as a toddler.
Those memories, along with Disneyland and the image of my father smiling, have become faint traces of what were once vivid moments.
Life moved quickly as our family fought to keep my father’s killer in prison. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, he had been released after serving minimal time for a premeditated murder. He was prohibited from entering the state of Montana.
Years later, we learned he had fallen and become paralyzed from the neck down.
Still, there was never any remorse.
Finding a sense of humor during times like these was the only way we knew how to survive.
It helped fill the void.
It helped us overcome.
It helped us find a path out of the darkness I came to know at such a young age.
Sometimes I think I got to know death before I got to know life.
After my father died, my babysitter also passed away. I had grown very close to him through our daily visits, and he became a source of comfort while my mom worked long hours trying to hold everything together.
Just three years before my birth, my mom received a phone call from her aunt. Her cousin and best friend, Susan, had been shot, thrown into the back of a pickup truck, taken to a pre-dug grave, and buried alive next to her husband.
Mom carried more pain than most people could imagine.
My grandfather often told me, “Your mom was such a free spirit before she lost your dad and Susan.”
I can see glimpses of that free spirit in her today, but in those early years, life was filled with constant stress.
During the holidays, my siblings and I were often part of adopt-a-child programs because the real estate market would crash during Montana’s long winters. Yet somehow, Mom always managed to keep our heads above water.
We even moved into a house that we later learned was haunted. After moving in, we discovered the previous owner had taken her own life there, slitting her wrists in the bathtub.
I learned about spiritual warfare at a very young age.
Life will always be filled with ups and downs, but we can control our attitude, our perspective, our sense of humor, our faith, and our physical fitness.
We had to focus on the positive because the negative would have destroyed us. It would have consumed our souls. It could have led us down the path of addiction, bitterness, and despair.
Instead, we chose faith.
We chose fitness.
We focused on what we could control: our attitude, our faith, and our fitness.
That decision served us well despite life’s many ups and downs because God reminds us that testing produces perseverance. Perseverance develops character, and character aligns us with our purpose.
Every one of us faces spiritual battles.
Every one of us is called to overcome.
Don’t waste your suffering.
Use it.
Allow it to strengthen you.
Allow it to deepen your faith.
Allow it to shape your purpose.
And yes, find your funny again, even in the middle of the pain.
Tip #1: Focus on What You Can Control
Don’t spend your energy worrying about what you cannot change. Focus on your response, your attitude, your faith, and your actions.
Tip #2: Increase Your Intake of the Positive
Create space for joy.
Create space for laughter.
Be goofy. Be playful. Maintain childlike faith despite difficult circumstances.
Sometimes healing begins with allowing yourself to smile again.
Tip #3: Move Your Body
Fitness elevates mood and boosts brain chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine.
Movement is one of God’s greatest gifts for processing stress and trauma. It gives your body a healthy outlet so you don’t store everything inside.
Walk.
Lift weights.
Practice yoga.
Dance.
Move.
Because healing isn’t just spiritual—it is physical too.
Faith, fitness, and a sense of humor helped our family survive the unimaginable.
They can help you too.
