He Remembers…

I walked away in disbelief that someone could hurt me so badly. I drove home feeling numb but I could not cry. As I entered the front door of my home the pent-up hot tears fell as I sat on the floor and replayed the discussion at the table. What a horrible night!

Are you familiar with those tears? It’s as if something inside boiled up and just began to flow out of your eyes…and they don’t stop. It feels impossible to stop them. Disbelief overwhelms and waves of grief and tears just keep coming. You wipe them away over and over again and yet they just keep coming.

Father God is VERY familiar with our tears. Psalm 56:8 says that He numbers all of our wanderings and puts our tears into His bottle and records them in His book.

People will fail us, circumstances may blind us, and grief can hit at any time. But there is One who does not overlook how we wander through an empty house, stand at a graveyard, pound our chest in disbelief of a broken relationship, sit in the parking lot of a car with our heads on the steering wheel asking, “Why?” There is the Holy Father God who begins to intervene as we wrench and wail.

He doesn’t care what we look like, for we’re not very pretty when tears begin to fall. Our mascara runs, our eyes swell and might become bloodshot, but He doesn’t care. To Him it is crucial to begin to record every step you are taking and catch every tear that is falling!

We may wipe away the tears but He is literally catching them in His bottle: The bottle. Why?

It is because He is all too familiar with grief and sorrow. When He does this supernatural loving act He is saying to us as He gently catches the next tear, “Beloved, my Princess, I am well aware of how deep the pain goes, I’ve been where you are. I so love you and will stay by you as you begin to heal and this mess is over. Yes it’s a mess,” as he gently rubs our backs and whispers in our ear, “but I’m right here and I’m not going to go away.”

In Biblical days, when someone was ill or grieving, a friend would come and bring a tear bottle and sit with the weeping person as tears fell and collect them in the precious, loving vile.

God is for you. He will always be. He is concerned with everything that concerns you right down to a hangnail. And He does not forget your heavy steps or your hot tears.

So let them fall when they must but then rise up knowing that Father God will always remember when everyone else has forgotten.

Linda Boylan