The Quarter story. redeeming the time brothers podcast a podcast by Gene Kissinger and Norman Kissinger, two brothers who spent their lives in ministry and raising large families our desire is to provide a digital place for those who long to belong and as always, we want to leave a nightlight on for you.
that nightlight is at a Proverbs chapter 17 and verse 22, where it talks about the the benefits of a happy spirit, a merry heart doeth good like medicine but a broken spirit dries the bones, a merry heart doeth good like medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
He's talking here about the benefits of joy and having happiness as a hallmark of your life. Being a winsome witness for Christ. By having a light heart instead of being dreary toward everybody that's around you. Some people are just like a continual drip, drip, drip. They're full of sadness and despair and depression and God wants us to have joy Now that doesn't mean there are not sad moments or difficult issues in life, but they're also always good things that are going on around us
blessed things,
hopeful things,
wonderful things.
I remember listening to Norman Cousins. He wrote a book called headfirst he had he had received two different incurable diagnoses from doctors. He used humor as one of the medicine protocols to bring himself to the place of wellness. The doctors said there was nothing they could do for him. He rented Three Stooges videos and various other things that he thought was funny. This was back in the time when they had reel to reel kind of film, and he would watch that and laughter he found allowed him to be pain free. And and ultimately he got cured from these two terminal diagnoses. And he wrote a book called headfirst abiut it. In it he talks about being asked by a group of physicians to come and talk to some cancer patients that they wanted to give these patients at least Some hope and to lighten their day and cousins was a pretty funny guy. So he's up in front of these cancer patients, And he's talking about going up to a payphone. Now, you guys that are younger, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. But those of you that have got a few years behind, those with a few miles on your odometer, know what a payphone was. It was the way we used to communicate when we were out and about and we needed to call home or call a store or whatever, we didn't have a cell phone in our pocket. And so we had to go plug a quarter into the payphone and then make a phone call. You needed a quarter, It was kind of a survival tool, so that you could make an emergency call if you needed to. Well, cousins put his only quarter in this payphone and it didn't connect him to the number and so he needed the quarter back and so he called the operator and the operator gave him the runaround, you know, like they do at a company, there's always a procedure for how to do the thing at the company, if you feel like you've been taken advantage of, they'll take your name and your address and they'll send you the refund. And he explained to her the stamp and the envelope would cost more than a quarter. He just wanted her to make the pay phone give the quarterback so he can make his phone call. He then said, you add the price of the person that licked the envelope and the stamp and and so on. When he explained to her it would cost the company far more money than for her to just make the machine give him back his quarter so he can make his next phone call. And she's finally reiterating how we can't do that. This is how it's done. And then she said have you pushed the plunger, the coin return plunger? And he said no that he hadn't, he reached up and he pulled it down and $4 worth of quarter's fell out of the machine. I mean, it's raining quarters. It's like a slot machine paid off. Quarters pouring down on the on the floor of the phone booth.
The operator says, sir, I'm gonna need you to put those coins back in, return those coins into the phones c
