When Tears Are the Sweetest Therapy

Some tears are sweet therapy.
Go there when all is silent and safe.
Enjoy that time with God.
Can such tears be called “sadness”?
Only if “sadness” is a gorgeous thing.
Such a sadness is an enviable thing.
Only God can extract comfort from sadness.
Only the Lord could make pain replete with catharsis.
Go there. Into intimacy with God in you and me.
Sob those big, salty droplets. Let them run.
Let Him have them. Taste them and imagine saline healing.
Give them as a sacrifice of authentic worship.
Get messy in letting the heart out.
Let the heart finally have its voice.
Enjoy turning horror into gladness.
Only God could do it.
Only God can do it.
Let Him.

***

There are many I’m sure that cannot and will not believe the dualist reality of peace and sorrow coexisting, along with the free availability of joy, within tumultuous portions of grief.

Not just peace and joy, either; hope is known for that which is unparalleled in my human experience – how do I live without my son? It’s just like I learned to live without my first marriage when I simply could not let go. We get there.

The occurrence of sadness so thick with meaning takes us into a cherished place of living experience. How could anyone not want God when he shows us how wonderful the experience of sorrow is – a sadness not without pain, but a sadness, all the same, that makes up for the pain endured by a sense of meaning that blesses us most viscerally.

Such sadness invites us to depart from the world for a while to venture a lonely road. Such a path we happily trek; the Presence of God in the mode of the sadness more than makes up for what ‘joy’ might be postponed. Indeed, emotions so thick with meaning – indelibly touched by truth and grace – deepen our felt experience of life that is lived with purpose from start to finish.

Tears are the sweetest therapy. They give to an aching soul the gift of release. Tears authenticate how significant the matter we grieve is, and was, and will be.

God meets any of us prepared to venture deep into the dense forest foliage of our grief.

If we haven’t met God where all hope was lost, perhaps we haven’t met him at all.

When we are so committed to our recovery that we go into the teary vestiges of our loss we are bound to be blessed with healing.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.