The Best Medicine • followHIM Favorites • Sept 7-13 • Come, Follow Me

A woman with a bright blue mouth walked into a temple sealing room, sat down with a family she did not know, stood up, said “Congratulations,” and walked out. That is the story Hank Smith tells on this episode of followHIM Favorites, and it is not just a funny anecdote. It is the episode’s entire argument, delivered through two parallel stories: that laughter is not a distraction from spiritual life but a deliberate, even necessary, part of it.

The episode opens with a quote from Ecclesiastes 3: “There is a time to laugh.” Hank Smith and John Bytheway take that verse literally. They do not analyze it or contextualize it. They simply tell stories that embody it. The first comes from Elder Joseph P. Worthlin’s talk “Come What May and Love It.” Worthlin describes a night when one of his daughters went on a blind date. A man arrived, she introduced him to the family, and they left. But the car did not move. She came back red-faced: the man was there to pick up another daughter for babysitting. Worthlin says they could not stop laughing. When the real blind date arrived, Worthlin was still in the kitchen laughing and could not come out to meet him. The point, as Worthlin frames it, is that you have to learn to laugh. The daughter could have been embarrassed and upset. Instead, she laughed.