Laugh Your Pink Back Pt. 1: When You’ve Lost Your Pink

Did he mean for laughter to cascade like waterfalls, stripping away dusty crusts as it falls? Did he mean for laughing brooks to chatter cheekily of the refreshing that true laughter can bring?

It’s a beautiful sound, laughter.

And I don’t mean the polite kind which starts no deeper than the back of your throat. And certainly not the typed-out LOL which fails before it reaches your lips.

The real kind, that grabs you in your belly and folds you over. The kind that rumbles up and explodes without hope of restraint, that makes mascara run and cheeks ache and people reach for each other just to stay upright. The more violent the eruption—the more undignified the snorting and leg slapping—the more powerful and more beautiful laughter falls.

Children laugh easily; adults, less so. Encrusted by life experience, our laughter grows quieter, our delight slower, our joy more difficult to access.

Somewhere between building lives and holding them together, many of us misplace the sound.

Cut to flamingoes:

Did you know that flamingos are pink because of what they consume? Their colour comes from pigments and nutrients in their diet. But when they raise their young, they begin to lose colour. They pour nutrients into others until their own vibrancy fades.

How many of us know people like that? How many of us are people like that?

People who used to feel brighter. Lighter. More playful. More alive. Who once laughed easily, with so much air in our lungs.

Until weight by weight, responsibility by responsibility, loss by loss, we were folded over with just enough air to survive.

Bills to pay and deadlines to meet; dishes to wash, kids and pets to feed. Leadership. Marriage. Ministry. Grief. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, colour drained.

And not because we quit on life; not because we stopped loving Jesus. Not because we failed. We simply kept feeding everyone else.

The Church has been good at celebrating lives poured out. Less good at noticing depletion. We admire resilience, and rightly so. Resilience is holy. But replenishment is holy, too.

Last year, I found myself frighteningly depleted. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just gradually emptied by years of pouring. After a decade of pregnancies and breastfeeding, followed by a decade of parenting, ministry and compounded trauma, I glorified resilience, and myself as strong, capable and available—until my body finally admitted what my soul had been whispering for a long time:

I cannot carry all of this forever.

What startled me most was not finding my limit. It was God’s gentleness with it. Because somewhere deep down, I think many of us secretly believe that heaven is disappointed in us for being tired. As though God is standing over our collapse saying: You should be stronger than this.

But when Elijah collapsed beneath the broom bush in 1 Kings 19 after one of the greatest spiritual victories in Scripture, God did not begin with correction. He began with sleep. Food. Water. Rest.

No lecture. No shame. No demand for greater faith. Just kindness, and an understanding of what was needed.

Because sometimes spirituality leaks out through exhaustion. Sometimes the most spiritual thing a person can do is sleep.

Psalm 127 says: “God grants sleep to those he loves.”

Not to those who earned it. Not to those who have finished everything. Not to the insufficient or to those who can’t make it to the end.

To those He loves.

Which means perhaps rest is not weakness after all. Perhaps it is trust.

Perhaps some of us have spent so long trying to be almighty that we have forgotten that position is capably filled. My might is not without limit, and neither is yours. And living near the edge of it is breathtaking, in all the wrong ways.

If you find your self folded over without the air in your lungs to laugh, perhaps it is time to surrender, to willingly collapse into rest. It is the first step to getting your pink back. God not only wants to restore our strength; he wants to restore something softer.

Our delight. Our hope. Our laughter.

Because joy is the promise for your future.

Part 2 of 3 coming next week.

Watch the Sisterhood sermon: The Promise of Laughter