"Jesus wept."  John 11:35


Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to not be able to cry.  Whenever I think about that, I visualize myself building up pain on the inside until I finally explode, splattering flesh and blood all over the place.  So I am very grateful for my tear ducts!

Velma (my wife) and I do a grief support group and one of the women who had lost her husband several months ago had been saying through several meetings that she hadn't been able to cry yet, despite her desire to.  She was so grateful at a recent meeting when she came and reported that a particular song sung by some people she is close to had gotten to her and the dam had broken!  She felt so much better, and we did too. 

Life gets to us.  It should. Things are not the way they were meant to be.  Something went wrong and it wasn't good for us.  We hurt.  And sometimes life gets to us in other ways.  We are touched by some gesture of love or kindness or beauty and we cry, grateful to be touched so deeply with good. 

There's something healthy about people crying together in response to a common loss.  Funeral homes provide for a bit of this.  So often where there is crying there is also laughter.  If there would be any reason I'd like to go to funeral homes it would be to experience the emotions on both ends.  I sure hope people laugh at my visitations!  Yeah, hopefully also shed a tear or two.

One of the most beautiful pictures of crying I know of is the one of the woman who had been promiscuous coming to a Pharisee's house where Jesus was and wetting his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair.  Forgiveness and love feels really, really good.

So, cry when you need to.  It's so much healthier than turning the pain into anger and lashing out, though that may need to be done at times.  And when other people cry, let them.  Give them room to feel whatever they are feeling. 

Do you think God cries? 

"Jesus, I love the fact that you wept, that you are moved by the painful experiences of living in this world.  Help me to be willing to embrace the sadness that acknowledges that things are not as they were meant to be and move through that sadness to the hope, and eventual joy, as You do, so that I can be a channel of hope to others.  Amen"