THE SACRIFICE OF TEARS

Even the sky was filled with this permeating sadness.
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I awoke to clouds in the clear story windows. Not passing as they normally do but lingering, heavy with an absent rain.

This was me on my knees looking up. Braced with the awakening thought of what transpired this day.

I proclaimed inside my head that this is the most consequential day in all of history. And then I remembered, the third. Though my theology agrees the third is first, this Friday is first for me.

Did Jesus cry on the cross, I wondered? My need to cry in the moment is intense.

But the cost of my own human journey has left me without tears—
The sacrifice of the non-essential.
The sacrifice of conservation.
The sacrifice of release.

Writing this now, magnifies the moments when I chose to keep everything in check—
Stiffness in the neck. Burning in the chest—
Pain, it seems, is the body’s response when something held is meant to be set free.

All those years of keeping everything close, everything under control. The enemy cells disguised as composure, covertly having their way within.
I am gutted by the revelation, the magnitude of all we put our bodies through—
the anguish with no purpose,
created by our own design.

I drop my head to the comforter and stretch out my fingertips, imagining his blood soaked hands. In consideration of all he’d been through, would tears [his or mine] even mattered in the end?

And still, my body literally aches to cry.
Not for the losses I’ve remarkably endured.
Not for what may be.

There are tears that fall in sorrow
and tears that fall in relief.

But sometimes
they arrive together—
something tight and expansive
something too brutal to draw near to
too unfathomable to look away.

My body has nothing to offer.
No tears.
No release.
Only ache.

And I begin to understand what I did not come looking for.

That staying here, in this moment,
costs something.
Not only in the heart. But in the body.

In the way the breath shortens and the throat tightens.
In the way the sorrow drops you to your knees.

We measure his sacrifice in suffering.
In endurance.
In love that did not turn away.

But what of the cost to remain within that suffering?
To stand close enough to see it.
To refuse to soften the edges.
To not beg for relief.

Some could not stay.
I feel that now without judgment.
Not weakness.
Not failure.

Just the body saying, this is too much.

And then, some did.
Not untouched.
Not steady.
Only present.

Perhaps the greatest act of love there is.

I do not know what I would have done then.
But I know what it is to be here now—
in a body that cannot even produce the tears.

And somehow, that feels closer than I expected.
As if the offering was never the tears.
But the willingness to stay.

Not everything that asks something of us
is meant to pass.

Some things remain.

And in their staying,
something in us begins to change.

NOTES
There is a way of speaking about things that keeps them just beyond reach.
We discuss them.
And define them.
We arrange them into something we can understand.
And in doing so, we remain just outside of their intent.

And then there is another way.
Less articulate.
Less certain.
But closer.

One lives in the mind—
structured, explained, resolved.
The other lives in the body—
tightening, softening, resisting, yielding.

This is where something shifts.
Not in what you believe.
But in how near you are willing to be.

Proximity has a cost.

To stay with something long enough for it to move through you—
not around you, not past you—
but through you…
will ask something your body does not easily give.

But there is a deeper invitation still.

Not just to let it pass through—
but to let it remain.

Not as something to fix
or to resolve—
but as something shaping, forming, quietly working from the inside.

This is slower.
Less visible.
And far more costly.

Because what resides within you
cannot be managed from a distance.
It must be lived with.

We are practiced at stepping back.
Softening the edge.
Finding language that makes it manageable.
Calling it insight.

But there is a quieter invitation.

To come close.
Then, to remain.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him—John 16-17