Today, while looking for something else in my inbox, I came across an old blogpost by Tim Challies on Challies.com in regard to how society generally regards a Man crying as shameful.....yet Christ wept! I then recalled that some years back I had come across an article by Answers in Genesis on the Miracle of Tears.
And so it got me thinking a bit more about tears.... "Words from the heart that can't be spoken', as I saw them once described.
1. Tears are one of the very first aspects of life we experience! And our infant years are filled with crying and tears as it is our sole means of verbal communication at first - a basic response to whatever is not 'right' or 'nice' or 'comfortable' in life whether its hunger, a soiled nappy/diaper or colic pain.
2. We will only be free of tears once we reach heaven, where we are told that God Himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes - they will be gone forever. (Revelation 21:4)
But between our birth into this world and our promotion to the next, tears are part of life. But are they bad, or shameful or to be repressed and discouraged? I believe not.
So how should I ... you, deal with tears - those of our own and those of others?
Tears are not Shameful....
1. Did you realise that Scripture actually commands us to weep? We are to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. We are not told to tell a weeping person to stop or reprimand them or try to cheer them up with laughter, but we are told to join them! Chapter 2 of a book called "Loving Well" by Dr William Smith expands on this. (I'd recommend the whole book actually! ...and until 2pm USA EST Mon 12 May 2014 you can download a PDF of it for free!) If God is instructing us to weep, and to obey Him is to please HIm and therefore honour Him, then weeping with others who weep actually pleases God and honours Him.
2. Jesus wept - he wept over the sad sinful state of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), and he wept over the sad loss of his friend Lazarus, and he wept with his friends in their sad loss of their brother Lazarus (John 11:35). If Jesus who always honoured His Father perfectly, wept, then it is definitely not shameful to weep. Jesus didn't just tell his friends to 'get over it' and all the reasons why they shouldn't weep, He also wept with them.
3. Even though our society seems to treat Men crying as something 'weak' or 'shameful', men are not excluded from these situations, instead, if Jesus wept, here we are given the most supreme 'ok' for men to cry.
God made tears and the ability to cry
1. God made our voice, and the sounds we make of crying are ones, when emotions are such, that it is too difficult to find words to express them. It is a sound that comes from the depths of our being in times of grief, sadness and stress
2. Humans can cry - Animals cannot ......God made the way our body responds chemically to emotion and tears are part of that process. It seems from Scientific Studies that tears remove toxic substances from the body that build up from stress and that suppressing tears increases stress levels and diseases caused by stress. And so all of us, men as well as women, should not feel ashamed to cry.
3 Texila American University described various benefits of tears and then summarised them as "Tears are God's gift to us. It's our holy water. They heal us as they flow."
God notices and values our tears
- He stores them in His bottle (Psalm 56:8) - here is an interesting article about tear bottles and their use down through the ages...(although I don't go along with some of the mystical ideas of the author) I find it interesting Scripture doesn't seem to say God records our 'happy' times on earth, but rather our 'sad' times - those times when the sadness and pain of this sin-filled world overwhelms our soul. It is a reminder that the effects of sin in this world and the pain that His creation has to endure because of it, is something that is very much constantly on His heart. His heart is not hard to our suffering, but tender toward it.
- Jesus allowed (and did not rebuke or chasten) the woman to bathe his feet in her tears (Luke 7:38)
But we should not ignore that God's gift of tears can be abused and mis-used
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- a child for example may use the 'bursting into tears' to melt the mother's heart and try to avoid needed discipline
- some people (especially some children and some women) seem to have a greater ability to 'turn on tears' than others and can develop a pattern of manipulation or gaining sympathy
(NOTE: having said the above we must also be careful not to assume that a person is 'turning on the tears' just because they cry over something we think shouldn't be cried over. To ignore or dismiss someone's real pain without properly ascertaining its reason is cruel, unloving and dishonouring to Christ. If there is an ungodly reason, there may still be no reason to totally ignore the person, but rather seek to help them but in a way that doesn't re-inforce the pattern but enables them to see it and overcome it....And it is thought that possibly a substance called prolactin is involved in being more likely to cry and women have much higher levels than men so are more likely to cry than men, with no negative intent.)
- our tears can be unnecessarily prolonged in self-pity/self-focus or circumstance-focus instead of turning to God in our tears and focusing on Him and allowing Him to minister to us His peace.
- we need to watch our hearts, but also know that God sees our hearts even if others misunderstand
- I read some good advice that if you feel you need to really cry and its just not the time to do it or might be misconstrued, just hold off while you need to, and find a quiet personal place later on....but don't just always hold it in! Recently Challies.com had a link to a really lovely article for mothers' day about a godly persevering mum who retreated to her bedroom to weep after a particularly stressful day...
If we are to follow, obey and honour Christ, its OK to cry:
- for the lostness of the lost
- over our own sin
- with others who hurt
- when we feel grief, loss and the pain of that
because :
We are actually exhibiting God's heart when ....
- we grieve for what grieves Him (sin and its effects of pain, hurt, loss)
- when we come alongside and care for those who are hurting as we weep with them
& We are allowing our bodies to function as God created them to, as we are actually allowing God, through the way He made us, to help heal our emotional pain.
And to conclude......
I was reminded in a devotional book by Joni Eareckson Tada recently (More Precious than Silver) that when at last we will experience freedom from the effects of sin in our world and in our lives and we will have 'no more tears' because of what Christ has done for us, He Himself will actually still bear the scars of our sin - He will be our Lamb but "as though it had been slain" (Rev 5:6)- He will still bear the evidence of what He suffered willingly on our behalf. He will still bear the reality of the shame of the death-price that He paid, yet it will be those same scars that will be our reason to give Him the greatest praise and honour for all eternity!
May my, your, our tears not be something to inhibit or submerge or harden ourselves against, but something to experience as part of God's plan for our well-being and a reminder of His love for us, and a cause to praise Him for all eternity when while he still bears the scars of sin, we will enter the fulness of 'no more tears'!
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