Each culture has its own way of showing emotion and expressing grief. The culture that we are working in is very embarrassed by crying or the display of strong feeling. People move into action quite quickly to try to prevent any show of tears.
But we know that our Lord Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. In fact, those words that relate his reaction to a very sad situation, stand in a verse all by themselves, "Jesus wept."
Taking advantage of a team from Salem Alliance Church, we organized a distribution of gift bags at our local hospital. I was in the corridor so as not to overwhelm the neonatal unit when our hospital chaplain came running out. "Madame, madame, your women are crying!" I assured him that it was fine and that they were just overwhelmed with things and tired and that this was totally normal for us.
But one of the women on our hospital team who was the last to leave the room, came over to me and said, "You know your women were crying." "Yes," I said. Then she added that the mothers' of the babies noticed it and one of the mommies said, "Look at how much they care about our babies."
Those mothers understood that they were tears of compassion and empathy and that they were the only language that our team could speak with any hope of being understood. The tears of our Lord Jesus should make us realize that to love the great peoples of this world will bring with it heart wrenching emotion. As we shed tears over those in our ministry settings, may it be said of us, "See how they loved!" IMG_0253.jpg 216.68KB 2 downloads