You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book. Psalm 56:8
“All the temporal things that we tend to build our lives upon – the accumulation of wealth, material things, health, popularity, status, career success, and the like – fade into the background to a place of lesser gravity and significance. In their stead comes an awareness of things that really matter: things like love, conversation, laughter, eye contact, holding hands to the very end, the treasuring of every moment, and tear ducts – the release valve that our weeping God created to help us exhale our grief. Tears are our stake in the ground, our tender yet tenacious protest against things like death, mourning, sorrow, and pain – things that we know intuitively are not supposed to be.”
Scott Sauls in Befriend: Create Belonging in an Age of Judgment, Isolation, and Fear (Carol Stream: Tyndale, 2016) 101-102.
Pastor James Hoxworth at Bridgeway Community Church preached on lament from Psalms in his sermon this past Sunday (“Good Grief” dated 23 July 2017). The generous compassion of “our weeping God” struck me. He not only knows our pain and sorrow so much that He collects our tears in bottle, but He gives us the ability to “exhale our grief” through our tear ducts. What a gift that is to each of us!
Undoubtedly there are things that make you cry, such as the suffering of a loved one or pain that you endure personally. When we suffer physical, emotional, relational or other difficulties our minds become keenly aware of what really matters. This heightens my resolve to use the resources God has entrusted to us minimally for temporal things in order to maximize our bandwidth to minister generously to the brokenhearted.