It’s okay to cry. That is what I had to tell my children yesterday. Somewhere along the way of 11 and eight years of life, they have already learned to hold it all in - like trying to pack a month’s worth of clothes in one standard-sized suitcase. We have all done the drill - when you sit on the bag with both knees and try to zip it shut, praying the zipper doesn’t bust. 

If the zipper busts we become angry and shout, “It’s because they don’t make things like they used to!” Zippers used to be metal; they’re all plastic now. We replace the boys’ winter coats twice a year - not because they wear them out or because they outgrow them, but because the stupid zippers are junk. Junk, just like the lies my children absorb - like the subtle whispers that it’s not okay to cry, that it’s better to bottle it all in and let it settle inside somewhere so it can mutate and grow in its cozy little cocoon and rear its head in 30 years through heart disease and high blood pressure and cancer.

Tears are a gift. They are the sweet release of pain or frustration or joy or grief or any emotion too powerful to be contained. Jesus wept. When he found himself surrounded by the grief of friends over the death of a loved one, scripture says he was “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” He feels the pain we feel when we are grieving. You know the feeling - it’s that heaviness in your chest that bears down every time you exhale. It’s the weight in your body that doesn’t want to take one more step, where you would rather lay your face down on the ground and just melt into the floor beneath you. Jesus was there with his friends when they felt that same pain, and he is with us now. And what does he do?He weeps with us. I am not talking about a trickling tear or two. I mean weeping: the moaning, aching, crying out release of anguish. 

My children are sad. My husband left this week for a tour to Iraq and will not be home until next year. In their sadness, they do not need someone to pat them on their backs and say, “Pick your chin up. Everything will be just fine.” That only alienates them more and makes them feel as no one else understands. What they need is for someone to be willing to sit down in the floor and cry with them. They need to hear that it is okay to cry, that Jesus is even crying with us, that it stinks to be sad, and that they are not alone. That is what church is really about. It is not about teaching functional denial. It is about knowing the wounds of one another and carrying one another’s burdens. Before Jesus offers his next miracle, he offers something much deeper and more personal: he makes himself present, absorbs our anguish and weeps with us. And if crying is good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30, 2008 at 06:14 PM.

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