There is a Fungus among us

Chris,
My ex-husband Dacey used to call himself a fungi. He would say this and then pause with a playful smirk on his face…..
"Do you get it? Do you get the joke?"
FUN GUY......fungi
People would smile and laugh. If I said the exact same thing people would groan and roll their eyes. He had the "art of delivery". He could say pretty much anything and have people laughing. People either loved him…… following him everywhere,
Or he completely annoyed them thus they avoided him.
He of course never even noticed the people who ignored him. His entire focus was on monitoring his groupies for reactions. What will get that next laugh? He loved to bring a smile to your face. His entire life was centered on that one goal:
make people happy................... and people do want to be happy.

I did though. I noticed the looks of irritation that were tossed his way. At restaurants when he would blurt out a loud comment or throw something across the room to surprise the friend he just noticed sitting over there.
I was of course the spoil sport. In the car on the way home I would lecture him on
 "It is OK to be funny but not rude to strangers. Once was funny, but you kept throwing stuff!That is so disrespectful to the other people in the restaurant! Believe it or not they don't want to watch you. They want to eat their dinner." 

He would just tune me out.

BLa BLAAA……. BLA bla bla!   BLABLAaaaa….. BLa bla….

I was negative and boring in his mind. EVERYONE was laughing what was my problem? 

I was embarrassed. I saw the dirty looks. He had gone to far.....again. If he could just learn the line between funny and interrupting.

The only thing he noticed was the smiles, the giggles and his friend's exaggerated wave
 "Hey dude! Good to see you!" 
Everything is play. Everything was just an explosion of fun everywhere he went.

I learned pretty quickly "the lecture" got me nowhere. I just ended up looking like a grumpy nag. So instead when his antic's became public or disrespectful to people I would simply vanish. I can't control him. This is his handpicked crowd. So when he started yodeling on the second floor of a mall from the balcony…..

I vanished.

I had the car keys. He WILL FIND ME eventually.
When we had met a new couple with a very formal wife…….. He felt this gathering was a bit stiff…..so he thought he would break the ice. He jumped up on to the coffee table and started to dance.
Everyone burst out laughing except the woman who owned the coffee table. She ran off into the kitchen with a look of horror. I thought she was going to throw up. I chased after her…."I'm sooooo sorry!!! I am so sorry!"

I thought she was going to lose her mind. I tried so hard to calm her down. She  was standing with her back to me grasping the door handle to the oven. She was hunched over the stove shaking.

Eventually she got a grip. She clamped down on herself and faked a smile and whirled around "That's ok…..I understand. You can't control him." She forced herself to grab the next plate of hor dourves and went back out into the living room.

I was sure we would NEVER see them again. However her husband loved my husband, thought he was a total kick, so we were once again invited over……This time the coffee table was nowhere to be found and all the furniture was covered in blankets….
ARG.
She had this smug little satisfied look on her face…. "I'm ready for you!"

Did he notice any of that? Nope.

He just figured I was blowing it all out of proportion. She invited us back! Everyone was happy. His "fix" to the boring party had worked perfectly. I was just not getting it. 

Do you see?
It seemed like we both wanted the same thing. We both wanted to make people happy. We just had radically different approaches and were worried about a very different group of people.

 I wanted to solve the problems that made people grumpy and he wanted to use shock value and humor to "snap people out if it". He felt if he could get people to laugh then they were truly happy. The laughter created this stamp of approval on everything unconventional he did. That is the way fun-guys work.

I didn't take that kind of happiness seriously. It is nice to have a break from reality but there are also times where we suck it up, and just go along with the crowd because we are struggling right now. "This is not the place for doom and gloom." We reason.

However when you are alone again……………….how do you feel? Getting a break now and again is wonderful but a real resolve seems better to me.

After my divorce I was DONE with the "fake it, till you make it" motto. I wanted a real fix not a fake it one. I'd been a Christian since I was 10yrs old and he was raised in a Christian home. "We had the answer" yet our world had just blown up. This led me to the question………….

Is Jesus for real?

Or is this really just a dumb game we all just play?

In Christ always,
T