In a world inundated with pain and death, a sense of humor is a vital skill. As a profession prone to intense stress, mission work especially demands a healthy sense of humor. Thankfully, language learning and cross-cultural communication give missionaries more than ample opportunity to practice this skill.

Take for instance one of our church members, who in his awe at a lowlander girl’s special music, exclaimed in the native language, “She’s so good! She really knows how to sing!” The only problem was that in the trade language of Tagalog which the girl spoke, he had effectively remarked, “She has a great body!” It took a while to pacify the girl’s enraged guardian.

I had a chance to experience the same embarrassment myself a couple of months ago. Speaking to my friend in the native language outside a lowlander store, I extolled the merits of a particularly tasty piece of coconut bread. “Wow, this is really good!” I said, forgetting that in Tagalog the same phrase effectively means, “Wow, he’s really fat!” The very large man standing in line next to me suddenly started sweating and slowly inched away into the crowd as I turned several shades of red.

More than once, though, I’ve been on the receiving end of the humor as no one expects the young white man to speak their language. A couple of weeks ago, I was on a busy street buying rice from my regular rice vendor. As we chatted, one of her friends who didn’t know me drove by. Thinking I was just another foreign eco-tourist, he hollered, “That one’s still young. See, his head is so small!” Both of us burst out in good-natured laughter as the man drove on, oblivious.

As a language learner prone to mistakes, I have a great amount of respect and tolerance for the mistakes of those who are trying to learn and use my own language. Just as my language learning provides the village free entertainment, there are times when I can’t help cracking up at my friends’ use of English. At an Adventist convention, the song leader encouraged us to, “Fall on our heads and praise God!” A few minutes later, the speaker was introduced with the statement, “He was born at twelve years of age.” I had to smother my guffaws to keep from breaking the solemn mood.

Tonal languages are a special challenge. While living in Thailand during my high school years, I had a particularly hard time with a certain set of sounds in the Thai language which, depending on the tone used, can mean dog, horse or doctor. Countless times while searching for my runaway golden retriever, I asked the locals, “Have you seen my doctor? He’s about as tall as my knee, and has long yellow hair.”

That was nothing, though, compared to the time at the local hospital when I asked the nurse, “Is the dog in today?” Getting a puzzled look in response, I decided to be more explicit. Pointing to my doctor’s office, I repeated, “The DOG! Is the DOG in today?”

In order to learn and use a new language, it is inevitable that we make lots of mistakes, some of them very funny. The only healthy way to deal with this is to laugh right along with people. Thankfully, many doctors say that laughing actually increases the body’s white blood cell count.

If that is the case, missionaries should be about the healthiest people in the world. And as we laugh along with our people, we are making friendships that will last into eternity.

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