Bring Your Tears to the Lord

REFLECTION 
This autumn has been one of the most vibrant, golden, and pleasant of seasons in years’ past. It has also been one strewn with griefs big and small. Darkening days gave way to seasonal depression. Wars reached sobering anniversaries. Funerals were held in childhood churches. Neighbors lost hope in our country next door to neighbors who breathed sighs of relief for it, and neither of them are willing to talk to each other.  

As Christians, we know that God is sovereign over everything, and that His ultimate victory will undo all sad things. Yet it’s hard to reconcile the fact that God’s will and plan would allow people to die violent and preventable deaths, or that hatred take the name of action. I sheepishly must use the ‘but’ that Pastor Chase (very aptly) preached against: as someone once told me, “God is in control, but that doesn’t mean that what we don’t want to happen, won’t happen.”

To grieve is not a betrayal of trust in God’s will or sovereignty. As the writer of Ecclesiastes said, God has put eternity in our hearts–we know in our nature that the world should be better than this, that death and decay should not be the natural order of things, that the reason we gravitate to stories of once and future kings is because our souls were made in the image of one. If we did not grieve the deaths, injustices, or demises of the world around us, we would not long for heaven and a savior. We are homesick for our true home. The world will know Christians by our love and ask us for our reason for hope, and neither of these disqualify the presence of weeping.

Much like Job, we will not know why God’s will allows for our losses and pain in this lifetime. We don’t know why He allowed genocides, war, and generational traumas. We do know, though, that He grieves for it far more than we do. So much so that through the death and resurrection of His beloved son, He will bring a new heaven and earth where all injustices will be answered for, the earth is restored to its full glory, and our brothers and sisters will be free of the illnesses, torments, and violence that took them away from us the first time and never again.

Until then, as we live in times of questions and doubt, we do know this: Jesus wept, too. 

Are there griefs that you need to share with brothers and sisters and receive comfort for? That you stifle out of rationality or shame? Griefs that you need to shout at God why? Bring your tears to the Lord.

His hands are tender.

SCRIPTURE 
1 For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
The God-Given Task
9 What gain has the worker from his toil? 10 I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
- Ecclesiastes 3:1-11

PRAYER
Heavenly Father, break our hearts for what breaks Yours, so that through our tears we are filled with Your love, compassion, and grace for others and ourselves. May our griefs fuel our prayers rather than stopper them, even when we are at a loss for words. Have patience and mercy on us when we do not immediately seek You in our suffering, but guide us back to Your comforting arms. May we hunger deeper for Your grace and second coming.
Amen