Cry it out.

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I’ve always been impressed when actors cry on cue. Recently I read the biography of Melissa Gilbert who played the part of Laura Ingalls on the TV series “Little House on the Prairie.” When an episode called for tears, she’d separate herself, close her eyes, and withdraw into a sad memory, focusing on it until she’d brought it from her past into her present. After several minutes, real tears would come.

I wonder if there’s a difference between coaxed tears and those that come when we’re trying to hold them back. If examined under a microscope, would scientists be able to tell the difference?

My friend Barb Ingraham wrote, “When scientists studied human tears, they discovered the purpose of the tears determined their chemical composition. Tears to cleanse foreign objects were different from tears of sorrow, which were different from tears of joy.”

When I read that, I thought immediately of our God who delights in tending to details, assigning a purpose to each one. He cares about our crying, keeps track of our tears, and ministers to the reason for our weeping. And it gets even better than that. God uses the product of our grief, the tears themselves, to help us. Barb wrote, “Tears of sorrow actually have natural anti-depressants that cause a literal lift in body and spirit.” We have an awesome, helpful God!

When I was a newlywed, I awoke one night feeling sad about something (can’t recall what) and started to cry. Climbing out of bed and heading into the next room, I sat on the couch and bawled my eyes out, wishing Nate would wake up and come looking for me. I desperately needed his arms around me but wasn’t going to wake him.

I sat on the couch sobbing for 15 minutes or so when suddenly there he stood in the doorway, his eyebrows up and his mouth hanging open. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“I’m sad.”

“What should I do?”

I looked up at him with my wet face and runny nose, aching to have him enfold me in his arms but wanting him to initiate it. (Such was the mindset of a newlywed.) Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, he sat down next to me and put his arms around me, exactly what I’d longed for.

I melted into him with a tremendous sense of relief and gratitude. Before long my crying calmed to a sniffle, and we both went back to bed. The crisis had passed, because of his love.

Each of us cries because of a crisis, and it’s God’s love that can bring us through. We see it in his design of our specific tears, realizing he knows why we’re hurting and, more importantly, knows what we need. Whether it’s reassurance of his love or something more, he’ll make sure we get it. He may not take away our crisis, but he’ll be our shoulder to cry on as we move through it.

And he makes this additional promise:

“They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” (Psalm 126:5)

A Man of Integrity

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Today is the 20th anniversary of my Dad’s death in 1991. He married for the first time at 42 and was privileged to hit the 50 year mark with Mom, shortly before he died. Although he didn’t have even one health issue at the ripe old age of 92, a fall that splintered his pelvis into 13 pieces proved fatal. Although a young person could have tolerated traction for so long, immobilizing an elderly man worked against his survival.

Dad was born in 1899, a fact we children flaunted on school playgrounds. Mom used to say he was a contemporary of D.L.Moody who died 3 months after Dad was born. As a kid I used to reason that older was wiser, so Dad must have been the wisest father around.

The first child of parents who’d immigrated to America as teens, Dad spoke only Swedish when he walked into 1st grade at age 6. But he was quiet and observant, quickly learning English and other American ways, like how to avoid the knuckle-smack of an angry public school teacher.

He lost a little brother to pneumonia when he was 12, and his mother to TB at 13. After helping raise two younger siblings then training with the Army during World War I, he rode a streetcar to Northwestern University and emerged with two degrees. He navigated the Great Depression as a 30-something, and worked tirelessly to preserve his dying father’s real estate business.

My sister, brother and I loved hearing stories about the early 20th century, viewing him as a walking, talking history book. As a kid he chased after horse-drawn ice wagons hoping for loose chips on a hot day, and watched donkeys drag wagons of dirt out of hand-dug tunnels, Chicago’s eventual subway system. The city was paved with mud, election results were announced with fireworks, and all of it fascinated us.

Dad was honest to a fault. If a letter arrived with the stamp uncanceled, he’d say, “You can’t reuse that stamp, you know. It did what it was bought to do, and using it again would be robbing the postal service.” Letters only cost two cents then, but his statement was more about integrity than money.

Despite a bumpy background, Dad never experienced self-pity or bemoaned his losses, accepting life as it was. Although he wasn’t demonstrative and rarely shared his emotions, we all knew he loved us and would do anything in his power to help us. We also knew he gave 50% of his income to God’s work at the peak of his business career, which spoke volumes about his faith priorities.

My siblings and I were given a gift in Dad, but also a responsibility. Scripture says, “When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required.” (Luke 12:48)

And then there was Dad, who had much taken, but gave more than he’d been given anyway.

“Those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.” (1 Corinthians 4:2)

 

 

Jolt of Joy

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Nate has been gone a little more than two years now. Yesterday I found a stack of pictures I’d tucked into an upstairs drawer, photos I hadn’t seen in over a year. He was in every one of them. The value of these images has skyrocketed, because we can never make more.

I love looking at pictures of Nate, staring into his face, thinking about him. For a split second, he’s back.

Last week I came across one of the weekly index cards he wrote for each of our away-from -home kids every Sunday. As always, it was covered with his difficult-to-read handwriting, sharing family news. I read it three times, studying his words and especially his signature, “Love, Papa.”

Today I had a third split second visit from Nate in the most unlikely place: our basement freezer. I was digging around for a bag of pecans I knew were in there someplace, holding frozen packages of meat, veggies, and chocolate chips in my arms, when a pale pink Post-it fell to the floor. It had a tiny white shoe taped to it with the word “Thoo” and an arrow pointing to it.

When our toddlers were learning to talk, Nate had always been fascinated with their mispronounced words. He loved language and read dictionaries for pleasure, but no words fascinated him more than the ones his kids created. He found particular delight in using their nonsensical vocabulary in his own conversations, words like “chach” for lunch, “setsup” for catsup, and “eltenoh” for elephant.

As for the pink Post-it, one of our 18 month old girls had first called her shoe a “thoo,” and Nate found that charming. He began using it to refer to his own “thoo’s,” and years later, when Barbie-doll and her beau Ken-doll joined our family, he laughed and laughed over their tiny shoes. Long after the girls had left dolls behind, we gave away our accumulated Barbies, Kens and their dilapidated wardrobes, including enough shoes to impress Imelda Marcos.

Then, as we were packing to move two years ago, one of Ken-doll’s miniature white bucks appeared under a bookshelf, its mate long gone. Nate didn’t just enjoy a private chuckle and sweep it into the dust pan. He put it in his pocket instead and made a plan. Eventually, the “thoo” silently appeared on my dresser, a tiny inside joke between a husband and wife.

How that piece of paper got into the freezer I’ll never know, but I have a hunch. Our God cares about the little things and loves to surprise us. He knew I’d get a little jolt of joy today from that tiny shoe and so arranged for it to walk back into my life via the freezer…

…a thoughtful God reminding me of a thoughtful man.

“Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13:8a)