Tears and Pain

Tears are a bit of unfamiliar territory for me. Somewhere along the journey of my life, I have convinced myself that I don't cry. I have blamed it on being a thinker vs. a feeler, but I am beginning to see there is much more going on. Don't get me wrong, I do cry. Beautiful things, God moving, other people's hurt, these cause tears to well up and pour out, but usually in small, manageable quantities. Crying over my own pain is quite a rare thing.

I feel hurt and grief and stress, but I am unable to label these as such in the moment. Instead, my busy life gets busier, or I hide behind easy comforts of Jane Austen movies and ice cream. It is hard for me to identify and verbalize hurt, till it is too far down the road.

Last year, the inability to cry, really cry, landed me in a lot of pain. See my body rebelled against my emotional constipation. I had a stressful year in every possible sense of the word. My well-controlled world came tumbling down like a house of cards. See, I like order, I like control. Most people when their world crumbles, they do too.  My deep seeded lies rendered it impossible for me to fall apart, so I ordered my life even more. The more chaos was mixed in, the more controlled I got. Well, all that emotion has to come out somehow. I didn't let it out through crying, through exercise, through art, not even through writing in my journal.

But come out it did. I lived most of last year in exorbitant amounts of pain. My hips felt as if someone was pushing them down. My heels as if someone was pushing them up. My head and neck as if it had been twisted like a bottle-cap. Doctors said there was nothing physically wrong with me. So I turned to the Great Physician.

He took me by the hand and exposed all the hurt and pain; He is exposing it still now.  He caused me to see the things out of my control as His doing. He grabbed all the pieces of my life and threw them in the air. I was desperately trying to grab them and reorganize them back in place. When I finally let go of the fistful of control I was fighting for, He ordered the pieces in far better ways than I could have ever dreamed.

I have been praying that God would reawaken the tearful side of me. That He would break my heart for what breaks His heart, and that He would teach me to grieve in good and healthy ways (ways I guarantee are far less painful). Today, He answered that prayer in a small way. I was face to face with my hurt. As soon as I heard His voice in that hurt, I cried my eyes out, and it was even in public.

Who knew tears could be a panacea for pain?