Tears.

It was a friend who shared this with me:

Frederick Buechner writes, ‘People often ask how do you listen to you life?’ How do you get into the habit of doing it? How do you keep ears cocked and your eyes peeled for the presence of God or the presence of anything else?’

Pay attention to any of those moments in your life when unexpected tears come in your eyes. You never know when that may happen, what may trigger them. Very often I think if you pay attention to those moments, you realize that something deep beneath the surface of who you are, something deep beneath the surface of the world, is trying to speak to you about who are you.

You never know what may cause them. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure: whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.’ They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are. More often than not, God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and to summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.

So I’ve been finding tears at the back of my eyes more often than I would have liked over the past few weeks at work. They come at unexpected times- when a memory of an old patient under my care who had passed away surfaces to mind, in the middle of a busy workday when I find myself asking why I’m doing what I’m doing, or when I think about the future, its uncertainty, and what it holds.

Tears. They come at the most unexpected times. Embarrassing, to be honest, and I always try to hold them, look away, or at least, pretend that something got into my eye.

Over the past few days, I tried to take time to ponder and pay attention to my tears, trying to find out the root of a reaction only God and I can explain.

I realized, I really don’t like being called Doctor outside the hospital. I want to be known as me, me who has a life outside this sterile and stressful autoclave, me who also studies art and painting and reads about missions and social work and not just about pharmacological effects of drugs. I want to have time apart from the clinical drudgery of routine work, day in day out.

But then, it was only on deeper introspection that I realized, the tears revealed something else- the pain of losing lives, the guilt of losing my calm and feeling like my character failed to stand up to mounting pressure or grating events, the guilt of feeling envious of other people’s positions, the guilt of past mistakes and coming into conflict with others, the sense of loss of not knowing exactly where I’m heading. In short, of not being able to meet up to that subconscious expectation of myself to deal with tragedies, stressors and disappointments on a daily basis.

“D,” I confessed on Friday, “Sometimes I wish people wouldn’t introduce me to their friends as a doctor.”

But it was only today after dinner during our usual long talk that it was dad who suggested to me with uncanny accuracy, ” If you ask me, Jia, I think… your struggles all this while with work and all those emotions all stem from one thing- because of all that’s happened, you and perhaps others, expect yourself to be an angel. And when you’re not, you can’t help but feel guilty and disappointed about it.”

Uncanny, because that was what my big sis, D, had sort of suggested to me a couple of days ago too.

While being human certainly should not excuse us from committing faults and sins over and over, I forgot, that in spite of all the fanfare and newspaper coverage and people telling me certain things… … I am but made of clay. I am a human being who gets tired and grumpy and hungry after working for more than 20 hours straight without rest with another 10 more hours to go, I am a human being who is learning how to be transformed on a day by day basis, I am a human being who is female who has PMS and is learning how to cope with the daily demands of a high-demand job. I am not a saint. Or God. And because of what God has done for us, there is no reason to hold on to that tarry guilt which stains our hearts black. I should let go of it, come back to God to ask for forgiveness, and seek a brand new day with confidence.

Tears. They can be tears of human or godly sorrow, but while godly sorrow leads to repentence and growth, human sorrow leads only to death.

Tim Keller in a sermon on ‘Praying your Tears’ said: becoming a person of faith may lead you to weep more. When (one’s heart is changed), your heart becomes more of a heart. (In Ezekiel, God says I will remove your heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh) It is getting softer, more vulnerable, more touchable. You feel the evil and pain around you and you feel the pain of the people who are the victims of evil, you feel grief over the evil, you feel the things around you before, you just didn’t. As we grow in grace, we should expect to cry more. We should expect tears and when they do come, we should sow those tears, we should invest them.

Psalm 126:5-6 says: Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.

The poetic image here is that the farmer is going out sowing tears or perhaps watering their seed with tears. It is telling us do not avoid your tears, don’t just express your tears but you have to plant your tears, you have to sow your tears. Religious people tend to stuff their feelings and secular people tend to express them. But neither of those work, cause if you take your seed and sit on it you will never have a harvest, but if you take your big bag of seed into the middle of field and just dump it you will never have an harvest either. You can’t stuff your seed and you can’t dump your seed you have to plant it. We are being called to plant or sow our tears; to see your tears as an opportunity for fruitfulness and growth. Don’t waste your sorrows.

That is not a masochistic idea where it says embrace your sorrows but it not a hedonistic spirit where it says avoid sorrows. It says when the sorrows come, invest them, plant them. We have to sow our tears and what is our reward…joy. The bible teachers that tears gives way to joy.