Every Tear Was Kept, Including the Ones She Never Cried

The church kitchen has a hatch that sticks and a schedule on the wall that nobody follows and four tea towels, two of which are good.

After the meal. Fifty people fed and gone and the trestles folded and the four of them in here with the washing up, which is the best part of any Saturday and everybody knows it.

Somebody is telling a story about her son and the driving test. Somebody else is laughing so much she has had to put a plate down.

And she is right in the middle of it. Hands in the water, tea towel over her shoulder, saying the funny thing at the right moment. She is loved in this room.

There is a room in her life that she learned in. She was young and it went on a while and she learned in that room to feel nothing while something was happening. It is a skill and she was good at it and it got her through.

The trouble is she never unlearned it. And now, decades on, she is a woman who can be entirely present in a kitchen full of laughter and register almost none of it in her chest.

And what has begun to trouble her is not the flatness. It is a thought she keeps having, which is: you should have cried at the time, and now it is too late, and nothing was ever recorded.

Sister, put down the plate. Because there is one of the strangest and most tender verses in the psalms and I want to hand it to you.

Somebody kept them

David is on the run and being hunted and he writes this.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Three images and every one is about recording.

Thou tellest my wanderings. Tellest means counts. Every place he has had to go, counted.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle. A bottle. Not a metaphor about being seen. A container, and the tears go in it, and they are kept.

Are they not in thy book? And a book, which is the third record of the same thing.

He says it three ways in one verse because he wants it settled. Nothing has been lost. Somebody kept it.

You are attended to by Somebody who keeps a record of what happens to a person, and He kept it whether or not anybody in the room noticed. That is not a comforting embellishment; Psalm 56:8 gives three separate images of keeping in one sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a fugitive's psalm and stands it up in a church kitchen with the washing up going. The keeping was never dependent on your reaction.

Now the second half, and this is the one I actually came to say.

Your thought was that you should have cried and now nothing was recorded. Look at what that assumes: that the record was made out of your tears. That your crying was the recording device, and since it did not run, the event went undocumented.

But the verse does not say He collects the tears that fall in order to know what happened. He counts the wanderings. He keeps the book. The recording is His, and it was running whether or not you produced anything.

You were fully recorded during a stretch you produced nothing, and the keeping was never done by your tear ducts. Psalm 56:8 puts the counting, the bottle and the book all on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a settled fact in a woman rather than a hope, because a record kept by God is not improved or damaged by whether anybody wept.

What the stillness actually was

Let me say one careful thing about that room, and then leave it alone, because I am not going to make you go back into it.

What you learned in there was not a sin. I want to be very plain about that. Going still while something is happening is what a person does when there is no other option available to them, and it is not a moral failure, and God has never once treated it as one.

You call it a skill and you are right, and I would go further: it was a mercy that a body could do that at all.

And it is not something you have to dismantle to be right with God. There is no verse anywhere requiring a person to feel a past thing in order to be loved now.

You are not being asked to feel what you could not feel then, and He has never made that a condition of anything. Psalm 103:14 says He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that knowledge specific rather than general, which means He knows exactly what that room required of you and has never asked for it back.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than say the funny thing at the right moment.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how much you can feel in a kitchen. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.