Like Rain from Heaven

I have often pondered the billion, billion tears that have been cried by human beings in our time here on earth. I have seen tears of joy, tears of sadness, tears of despair, tears of relief and tears of exhaustion to name a only a few. My heart has been touched by many of them. As I have written before, there is something pure in the tears of honest emotion.

It was a recent encounter with tears of faith that got me to thinking. They were evidence of the conflict going on inside my friend. Their appearance was almost if to say, “I believe, please help my unbelief”. The thought occurred to me that each tear represented hope…hope of the way things could be, the way things should be. Maybe that’s what most tears represent, the difference between the way things are and the way we wish they were.

We wish our children never experienced any pain; that they never died before their time. We wish our faith was pure and without conflict. We wish ours was a better world. We wish that we were better people. Our tears are evidence of the difference between our dreams and our reality.

I believe that our tears keep us healthy. They preserve something vital in us. They may be all that does sometimes. Our tears preserve our humanity. Human tears have flowed like a river down through history. They’ve opened human hearts like a river opens dried seedlings. They’ve nourished new growth and kept us from drying up and blowing away. I have seen those who were no longer able to shed tears and it was as if something had died in them. I know in some of them something had died…their spirit.

There was a time not so long ago when men considered it ‘unmanly’ to shed tears except in the darkest moments of life. They paid a price for that... Men believed the world was hard and they needed to be hard to meet it head on. I believe that still…but I don’t believe there is anything unmanly in shedding tears. Sometimes it’s even a sign of real strength, the strength of an open heart. Hopefully more men in my generation are learning that. The women and children in their lives need them to have open hearts as much as they need them to be strong.

As I have written before, tears can represent moments of grace. It is a truth that a broken heart is an open heart. In the tears of a broken heart can be found moments of grace. While they cloud our eyes they can clear the vision of our hearts. Such tears can be like magnifying glasses that allow us to see the evidence of God the most clearly.

In my search for the evidence of Gods hand I am constantly amazed where I find it. Tears, too, are a blessing and a miracle from the Most High. The day is coming when He will dry them all and they will no longer be necessary.

Till that day…