We Cry A Lot
“Do you ever feel like you’re just waiting for the other foot to fall?” A church member asked me this question a few weeks ago. By modern church planting standards, Harvest Church was checking all the boxes. In our first year and a half of existence, God had blessed us with another pastor to share the load of leadership and deacons who serve with humility. Our members were regularly engaging both the church and our community. We baptized a new believer. We multiplied groups. The Lord had been generous to us.
But personally, the other foot had already fallen. The past year and a half have also been full of sadness. January of 2022 began with the murder of a twelve year-old boy in our neighborhood named Derrick. If I scroll through the videos on my phone, I’ll find a ten-second clip of Mary Margaret (my wife) beating him in a foot race on the Lafitte Greenway. Derrick’s goofy grin and subpar trash talk are the true highlights of the video. Two months later, Byron, a 6th grader at the school where I coach, was killed in a double homicide. Byron’s empty desk haunted the whole building for the rest of the year.
The other foot just kept falling. By the end of 2022, both of Mary Margaret’s grandfathers died. She sat by hospital beds, watching life leave the bodies of the two brightest men in her life. Their quick wits, playful smiles, and love of games slowly faded away, and all of a sudden, we found ourselves at two more funerals. Death seemed to be following us around like a dark cloud. Under its shadow, every seasonal cold, broken fuel pump, and faulty air conditioning unit made us think, “Here we go again.”
Needless to say, we cried a lot. But the school of suffering taught our souls how to lament. Psalm 10 gave voice to our prayer for Derrick:
“But you yourself have seen trouble and grief,
observing it in order to take the matter into your hands.
The helpless one entrusts himself to you;
you are a helper of the fatherless.
Break the arm of the wicked, evil person,
until you look for his wickedness,
but it can’t be found.” (Ps 10:14-15)
We cried until we had no more tears. Some days and weeks felt like a groggy walk through the fog. Psalm 13 provided Spirit-breathed words that our lips struggled to articulate:
“How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long will I store up anxious concerns within me,
agony in my mind every day?
How long will my enemy dominate me?” (Ps 13:1-2)
In the midst of trouble, Psalm 42 reminded us that praise and pain are not mutually exclusive:
“Why, my soul, are you so dejected?
Why are you in such turmoil?
Put your hope in God, for I will still praise him,
my Savior and my God.” (Ps 42:11)
Our pain wasn’t unique though. We had no illusion that we were martyrs. We were just sad. All over our church, people were wrestling with their own problems. Family members died. People sinned against one another. Bouts of depression came over some. Others sought to recover from past abuse. Somewhere along the way, God helped me realize that this is just the pattern of Christian life. The Father of mercies “comforts in all our afflictions so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Co 1:3-4). Any consolation and hope we received through Christ was not ours to hoard. Rather, our comfort was always meant to overflow to others.
To love is to cry a lot. Christianity never calls us to the sort of “don’t get attached” Stoicism of Greek philosophy and Jedi Knights. Everyone you know is just one phone call away from complete devastation, and if you invest yourselves deeply in the lives of others, you will inevitably enter into their afflictions. The greatest temptation for the Christian is to settle for a half-hearted counterfeit love that shares in neither suffering nor comfort. C.S. Lewis said it best when he wrote:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket––safe, dark, motionless, airless––it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
Our crying puts us in good company though. When God took on flesh and entered a broken world, his own heart was wrenched. As Jesus stood outside of the tomb of Lazarus, he wept (Jn 11:35). Salty tears slid down the cheeks of the Son of God. Nevermind that he would raise his friend moments later. Death was still a great loss. Instead of locking his heart up safely in a box, Jesus opened it wide. Lepers, blind men, and widows flocked to him, and he looked out on the distressed and dejected crowds with compassion, like sheep without a shepherd (Mt 10:36). He was a man of sorrows because he made ours his very own (Is 53:3-4).
The second recorded instance of Jesus’ tears seems to come out of nowhere. Immediately after his triumphal entry, one might assume that Jesus would be full of joy. But sitting atop a donkey, the King who comes in the name of the Lord begins to weep over Jerusalem (Lk 19:41-44). His sobs burst forth for the city that would kill him within a week’s time and ultimately, face a terrible judgment for their rejection. Jesus, the one who is grieved over the hard hearts of Pharisees, takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked and mourns over their unbelief (Mk 3:5; Ez 33:11).
The tears of Jesus change everything. Our tears let us know that something is fundamentally wrong with the world, but fixing the world is largely outside the scope of our power. Left to ourselves, we end up in the dead end of despair. But Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth, and he cares. When our hearts are broken over the brokenness and lostness of the world, we share in the heart of the King who will right every wrong. In the Magician’s Nephew, a young boy named Diggory comes before Aslan, the Christ-figure in The Chronicles of Narnia, and implores the Great Lion to heal his terminally ill mother:
“... A lump came in his throat and tears in his eyes, and he [Diggory] blurted out: ‘But please, please––won't you––can't you give me something that will cure Mother?' Up till then he had been looking at the Lion's great feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory's own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself. 'My son, my son,' said Aslan. 'I know. Grief is great’.”
The tears of Jesus transform our own. Tears of despair turn into tears of hope because the one who died on Friday and rose on Sunday cries with us. For this reason, we keep crying. We refuse to grow desensitized to violence and heartache. We remain open to people and places that will bring us great pain. Blurry eyes, snotty noses, and boxes of tissue will be the norm. Day after day, week after week, year after year, we will put our hand to the plough and weep while we work, believing that, “Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy” (Ps 126:5-6). Because one day, every hole burrowed in our hearts by grief will overflow with indestructible resurrection joy. The Lion of Judah will stoop down and wipe away all of our tears. Until then, we will probably cry a lot.
Andrew Hanna
