Why our sorrow ends in tears

Photo by Aliyah Jamous on Unsplash

In most if not all households there are times where good sense flies out the window, and for a time conflict causes momentary chaos and estrangement. On a recent evening, with tired minds and frayed nerves, we weren’t communicating as we should have, and I didn’t communicate with grace and understanding.

I was about to walk out the door,
about to let a heart fall
and be shattered all over the floor.

Then I got a nudge — ‘go back inside’. With a calmness foreign to how I was actually feeling, I strode inside and picked up the heart before it fell. I just had to repent. I had to fix things that only I could fix. Not things another person didn’t want me to fix. A thing I needed to fix.

There was a moment of palpable honesty.

Only I could address what only I had caused.

I didn’t have to, but I wanted to. What I didn’t have to do I actually had to do.

Moments of honesty are transformational. It is like the moment of immense sorrow that is met honestly. It can produce only one thing: tears.

What we cannot hide, that we also choose to face, must inevitably break us, and the result is a physiological response where our eyes leak, and that leakage is healing. It is the body’s fabulous design.

There is a simple equation where we are met in the process of spiritual healing:

Sorrow + honesty = crying

In honesty we cannot hold back what we authentically feel, and it is far from the end when we cannot hold back the sorrow we are forced to face.

It takes us to the door; the other side of which Jesus knocks.

Jesus is not interested in religion, no matter what we have been told. All Jesus desires is that we open that door, and we open that door in tears of truth, as we venture honestly, hand-in-hand with him, in our weakness, in blubbering our way to healing.

Sorrow plus honesty equals tears.

It is an admirable thing to be honest. Indeed, there is nothing more admirable.

As we bear our weakness confident in the Presence of Jesus there with us, committed to be emotionally true, modelling integrity in our brokenness, the strangest transformation process takes place. Healing through expression and exhaustion.

We cannot explain the mystery,
but we can accept that healing occurs.

Tears are a beautiful thing. But they are not just beautiful. They are intensely practical. Crying with regularity, giving a voice to that feeling of being overwhelmed, honouring how we actually feel, reaps the blessing of emotional congruence, which supports mental integrity, underpinned by spiritual integrity, all procured for honesty.

Both men and women benefit, and yet especially men, because it is not only they themselves who benefit, but it’s also their women and children who are major beneficiaries.

And when men cry without shame they model for the rest of society the truth about our human condition:

We were built to cry, we are made to cry, so we ought to cry.

If we don’t, we get angry. We get frustrated and overwhelmed because we cannot control our environment, and then we get violent, and in many ways, with and without physicality.

So, let’s just be honest, sorrow is part of life, and it needs to be cried for.

Our sorrow ends in tears because we’re honest. And that vulnerability is a gorgeously powerful thing.

From my experience, in crying I think Jesus must be saying:

Don’t judge yourself,
or think of yourself as pathetic,
for which you’re tempted into.
See that I see beauty in your tears.