The Best Medicine

One day over ten years ago now, a friend of mine called me up and asked me what size I wore. We are good friends so I wasn’t shocked by the question at all, but it was a strange question because it was coming from a man and not someone who was in the habit of buying me clothing. It’s very hard for me to say what size I am because I’m very tall and have long legs so I sometimes end up buying clothing that is a size or two larger than I need just to make sure it’s long enough in the legs for me. I also like to be comfortable, so sometimes I buy men’s clothing, especially jeans and sweaters and t-shirts, and sometimes I’ll buy men’s button down dress shirts because the cloth they’re made of is so much nicer usually than women’s, and the tailoring can be exquisite. I don’t wear them the way a man would – I’ll buy them oversized and wear them like a jacket or for casual wear at the beach. All this to say that when my friend asked me what size I wore, I couldn’t really tell him. His next question was, “do you have time to come over and try on some clothes?” He had a friend in town from Belgium who is a clothing designer who was just starting to show his first collection in New York. They were using my friend’s apartment as the showroom – my friend is an amazing interior designer and his apartments are always really beautiful. The one he lived in at the time was full of light and had big windows on a top floor of a building in the flatiron district, so it was a great location for all of the buyers and magazines to come to. The one thing they didn’t have was someone to wear the clothes – a showroom model. I love to dress up, so I walked on uptown to meet them, and began an adventure of a lifetime.

The clothing was the most beautiful I have ever seen. And when I started to put it on, it fit me perfectly and the different materials were gorgeous and luxurious in look and in feel. The designer had worked for one of the top haute couture designers for many years before starting his own collection, and his eye is impeccable when it comes to design and craftsmanship. The pieces in his collections are art work, and I am the luckiest woman alive because he asked me if I wanted to be paid in money or in clothing, and I said clothing immediately. There was no way that I could ever afford to buy anything that he made, so it was a bargain made in heaven for me. We had so much fun those next few days. The people who came fell in love at first sight with the clothes and with him. I worked with him for the next few seasons, every time he came to New York, and every time the clothing was even more tremendous than the last.

There was something wonderful that happened to me and the way I felt about myself which was a gift above and beyond the gift of the beautiful clothes. The designer is amazingly talented, but he is also a very loving person. To have someone of that caliber of talent, who is at the top of his industry and who has the respect of all the top people in his field spend quality time with me is something that you can’t put a price tag on. Just wearing the clothing made me feel like a princess, and his friendship and love wrapped me in a warmth that is hard to find anywhere. I had come to New York to be an actress, and from time to time I had done some modeling here and there or tried to, but there is so little respect for models and actresses – we come a dime a dozen, and everyone wants to be in the game, so it becomes ruthless and heartless and very ugly sometimes. There was nothing but beauty in our days together. Beauty and fun and love and life.

I’ve worked in a lot of places in the course of my life, either as a direct employee or because I was temping or working as a consultant. One thing that surprises me over and over again is that some people seem to choose not to have fun, not to enjoy the work they do, and sometimes to make the work environment downright unpleasant. It doesn’t matter if it’s a not-for-profit or a corporation with a lot of money – for some reason people sometimes think that work has to be something awful. Someone I worked with once said, “That’s why they call it work,” when I was trying to help them lighten up a bit and stop being so stressed out about the little stuff. There are stressors that come, but if we’re so stressed about the little stuff all the time, so worried about watching our own back, we can forget why we wanted to do the work in the first place. Even in office jobs that I’ve had that might have been monotonous there is room for joy – those jobs made me the money I needed so that I could continue to live the life of an actress and do the plays I loved for little or no money. The job may not have been wonderfully exciting, but it didn’t have to be awful either. I remember a woman said to me once, “You bring the peace with you.” At the time I didn’t know that peace is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit – and those gifts are given to us from our birth. They are always given to be used to help people.

We all have these gifts we are given. The choice is up to us whether or not we use them or go somewhere else, to a more negative place, in the way we interact with other people. Moses speaks about the choice that God has given to the children of Israel as the choice between life or death (Deuteronomy 30:19). It may not seem that we are making such a deep choice as death when we are just walking around with a bad attitude at work, taking our bad day out on each other, gossiping and condescending, blaming and finding fault and all the other things that people do sometimes, but that really is the choice we’re making. God is very clear about the way we treat other people and the environment we create around ourselves – there are no gray lines when it comes to the choice we make between doing things His way, with love and joy and peace, supporting other people and being kind, and the choice to go the other way. We can’t be mean sometimes and loving at others – bitter water and sweet water can’t flow out of the same well (James 3:11).

For whatever the reason, choosing the opposite of life can seem much easier sometimes. Choosing joy, for whatever the reason sometimes seems hard. But research shows that smiling uses less muscles than frowning, so it’s built into our bodies that it’s easier to be loving and kind. And just like any other muscle, the more you use the frowning muscles, the more you’re going to condition yourself to do that, so it follows the logic that if you start trying to smile more often, and maybe even laugh on occasion, joy might become something that is a regular part of your day. And it’s contagious too – just like yawning – when we laugh, the world might just laugh with us.

And laughter is really great medicine. Research shows that the lighter our hearts are, the healthier our minds and bodies. Our mind, body and spirit are all connected. When we are treating each other with kindness and love, when we are looking out for the best for everyone and not just ourselves, when we are assuming that all people have something that is beautiful inside of them, when we look for the God in others instead of the opposite, our own spirits will be lifted because we are allowing love into a situation where it can bring healing, light and life. God tells us that doing things His way is, "not too difficult for you or beyond your reach," (Deuteronomy 30:11) because "the word is very near you; it is in your heart and in your mouth so you may obey it." (Deuteronomy 30:14) When we fill our hearts and mouths with words of love and life, there is no room for anything else, and love is the one thing that will always overcome the darkness.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan