What’s Wrong With Crying?

I have been helping our Syrian family adjust to a new phase of life. Almost three-year-old Pella has started Day Care two days a week. She HATES it! On the mornings that she has day care she cries all the time she is getting dressed, saying over and over, “No Day Care”. She cries on the walk to day care. She cries when she says good bye to her mom. The teacher tells us she is fine once she is there and is adjusting quite well. While it is tiresome to watch all the crying I admit, I feel a little jealous! There are mornings when I would like to throw a temper tantrum and cry and cry and cry. Some mornings my skin just feels too tight, or I have to do something I don’t want to do. There are days I would like to have a ‘melt down’ and cry, kick my feet and say, “No, not gonna!”. Sadly, perhaps, I have been conditioned to think that is not a good thing and so I stuff it back, swallow it down, choke it in.

Now, some of you reading this might be surprised and say, “C’mon, Nancy, you cry all the time!” Yes, I do get emotional, often when I am preaching. Yes, my voice does quiver and quake when I am moved by something that I read or try to express. Friends tease me and some people squirm a bit uncomfortably, feeling awkward around the raw human emotion of tears. Why is that? Why do we feel uncomfortable with tears and especially with sadness?

This week we had a funeral for a dearly loved man of our congregation. Paul had been minister here for 14 years and he and Fern continued to live here in their retirement. We were sad to have to say good bye to someone so loved. There were tears. I also heard several people say, over the course of the visitation and service, “When I die, have a party, make it fun, no tears.” To which I replied, “I always tell my family they had better cry at my funeral, I want them to be sad that I have died!!!” Grief, tears and sadness seem to be hard emotions for us to accept and embrace. Tears do not negate that the person had a wonderful life and gave us much to be thankful for. Tears just say how much that person meant to us and that the deep emotion of grief brings sadness and grief. There is nothing wrong with that.

For about 1000 years before Christ, women would collect the tears they shed during the mourning of a loved one. The tear bottles would be placed in the tomb with the deceased as a sign of devotion and respect. In our culture we often try to comfort one another by saying, “Don’t cry”. And yet weeping can provide the healing we need. It releases our emotions and the tears wash away our grief and pain. We know that Jesus wept when his dear friend Lazarus died. We know that he wept over Jerusalem as he approached his final days. Jesus, like each of us, knew the gamut of emotion from joy to sadness, from laughter to tears.

I don’t apologize for crying. It is who I am and tears are part of my expressions for the rich and wonderful life I have been given with it’s joy and with it’s sorrow. Now I think I am gonna go and have a good cry.