Tears — Tim Keller

Let's read Psalm 39, verses 12 to 13, and Psalm 126, verses 1 to 6. Hear my prayer, O Lord. Listen to my cry for help. Be not deaf to my weeping, for I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger as all my fathers were.

Look away from me that I may rejoice again before I depart in Him no more. When the Lord brought back the captive to Zion, we were like men who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.

Then it was said among the nations, The Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy. Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negev.

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. This ends the reading of God's Word. Now, as you can see, this is a psalm or a couple of psalms about weeping, about suffering, about grief.

The Psalms and a Gospel Way to Process Feelings

We're looking for several weeks, not many. It's a short series on the psalms. It's sort of the opposite, in a way, of the series on the Apostles' Creed. When you take a look at the great teachings, the great doctrines, the great principles of the Christian faith, it stretches your mind.

But when you go to the psalms, it goes deep into the heart, deep into the emotions, deep into the motives of the heart. And what you have in the psalms, and this is a general introductory word I'll probably say every week.

The psalms gives us a gospel third way with your feelings. It's a third way between what religiosity and what secularity ordinarily tell you to do with your feelings. See, religiosity is very uncomfortable with feelings.

Religious people, by and large, want to deny the power and the depth and the darkness of their feelings. But on the other hand, secular people tend to see discovery and expression of your feelings almost as a good and in itself.

And once they discover their feelings, in a sense, they bow to them. Well, that's my feelings, and I have to go with my feelings. But you see, to bow to your feelings or to stuff your feelings, to be overawed by your feelings or under aware of your feelings, that's dangerous.

The psalms does neither. The psalms suggests neither. The psalms does not say deny or vent, but pray your feelings. Pray your deepest feelings. Bring them before God and process them. And that's something that I must tell you.

Honestly, I have myself, as I would say in my own Christian life, that's a relatively recent discovery of what the differences are between those three. Today, last week we looked at doubt. This week we're looking at pain and sorrow, tears.

The Prevalence of Lament in the Psalms

What do you do with your tears? There's three things that these texts tell us. By the way, if you were to take the psalms, 150 psalms, and if you were to break them into categories, one of the categories always will be what are called lamentations.

One of the categories is always psalms of tears, psalms of weeping and crying and grieving. And there's many other kinds of psalms, but I tell you, even though it's always a little bit arbitrary which psalm to stick in which category and so on, everybody admits, every commentator says, that if you were going to break the psalms into categories, there's more lamentations than any other kind.

This is the biggest piece of this psalter, tears. What do we learn here about what to do with tears? We're told three things. Expect tears, invest tears, and pray your tears. Expect them, invest them, pray them.

Expecting Tears in the Christian Life

Now, first of all, let's take a look. Expect tears. Now, Psalm 126, verses 1 to 3, look. When the Lord brought back the captives to Zion, we were like the men who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter.

Now, what is that? We're not sure exactly what it is. I mean, there's, you know, there's debates. People say, well, this is the return of the children of Israel from exile in Babylon after 70 years and they rebuilt Jerusalem.

We're not really sure. Nobody can be sure, but it doesn't matter for our purposes. The point is God did something for them that was so big that everybody, all the other nations saw it, and it was beyond anything they could even have imagined.

Look, it says we were like men who dreamed. It was a fulfillment of dream. They felt like that all their dreams had been fulfilled, more than they ever dared ask or imagine had been given to them. So God had done something terrific.

But then, we don't know what it is, but it was great. But then in verse 4, look. Suddenly, here, where we are now is restore our fortunes, O Lord. By the way, if you're studying this carefully, you'll see that the first three verses is in the present tense, and the last three verses is in the present tense.

Now, you say, wait a minute, how could this be? And the answer is they remember the blessing of God, they remember the great thing God has done so vividly that they're describing it in the present tense.

But where they are now is restore our fortunes like streams in the Negev. Now, the Negev was a barren, terrible desert, a lifeless desert. And though now, again, we don't know what was wrong, we don't know exactly what happened, we don't know if they were going through a famine, a literal famine, a literal desert experience, or whether they were going through a plague, or whether there was some crushing military defeat, we don't know.

The point is now their lives are like a desert. They've been blasted. Now, what's the first point? What do we learn? The first point is even if God's in your life, even if you're walking with God, you should still expect tears.

You should expect tears. You should expect lots and lots of tears. By the way, I'm giving you this as a... I don't know about you, when somebody says, I got bad news and good news, what do you want to hear first?

I want to hear the bad news first. I want to end on good news. So I hope you don't mind. We're starting with the bad news. And the bad news is this. Christians have a little myth. And the little myth goes like this.

If I'm a good little boy or girl, if I'm a good little Christian, God's not going to let anything really bad happen. But look carefully. We don't know what's happened. It's terrible. Their lives are like a desert.

But there's no word of repentance here. Do you see anything? Do you see them saying, Oh, Lord, return. We have sinned. We have strayed from your ways. We have turned to the right hand or the left. But now, oh, Lord, we commit ourselves to you again and be our Lord and we...

No. There's no repentance. They're not saying it was because of our sin that our lives are like a desert. No. Their lives are like a desert even though they haven't done anything wrong, particularly. What's this mean?

This means that the Christians are wrong. Christians are supposed to expect tears. Not just because they live in a world where everyone has tears, where things do go wrong. But I'll press you a little bit on this.

I think this indicates, since most Christians tend to think, Well, if something's going wrong in my life, I must have been doing something wrong. I'm not having my devotions or I'm not praying like I should or I've done something wrong.

Not necessarily. If anything, you might want to realize that the Bible indicates that becoming a person of faith, if anything, may lead you to weep more. You say, Well, how can that be? I'll give you two quick reasons why.

Number one, there's a great little metaphor that the Bible uses both in the Old and New Testament to describe conversion. There's many, many terms for conversion, but this is one of my favorite ones. In Ezekiel 11 and 36, Paul uses it in 2 Corinthians 3.

God says this in Ezekiel. He says, I will remove from them their heart of stone and I will give them a new heart of flesh. Now, what's that mean? It probably means a lot of things, but it means at least this.

When the gospel changes your heart, when God comes into your heart, your heart becomes more of a heart. It's getting softer. It's getting more vulnerable. It's getting more touchable. In other words, you feel the evil and pain around you.

You feel also the pain of the people who are the victims of evil and you feel grief over the evil. You feel the things around you that before you just didn't. You found self-defense mechanisms. You found ways of disdaining the people around you, for example.

When you saw evil people, you disdained them. But the gospel changes that. When you saw people around you who were screwing up their lives, you said, well, that's their problem. It's not my problem. But now you know what you've got and you know what they could be.

Listen, there are all kinds of reasons why, if anything, Christians, as they grow in grace, should expect to cry more. And I guess the last proof of this, since I guess I would have to think that some of you would find this a little hard to believe, there was once, according to the Bible, a perfect human heart that came into the world and lived here for a number of years.

And one thing we know about that perfect human heart, he was always crying. He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And so do you see the reason why there's some kind of illogic here when the average Christian says, I want to be like Christ and I believe that as long as I'm good and as long as I'm walking with him, he won't really let too much bad happen to me.

I mean, I would say Jesus was walking pretty well with God. I don't think you could say nothing bad ever happened to him. And therefore, the first thing is expect. Now, the reason I say this, very important.

I mean, maybe this seems too obvious. If you don't expect tears, you will always be crying about two things instead of one. And it's your fault. You'll be crying about the thing that grieves you and you'll be crying about the fact that you're grieved.

You'll not only be crying about the thing that makes you unhappy, the trouble, the disappointment, but you'll be saying somehow deep in your heart, maybe unconsciously but semi-consciously, you'll be saying, why is this happening?

I've been living a good life. What good is this? Why is God letting this happen to me? I shouldn't be crying. I shouldn't be weeping. So you're weeping about two things. You're weeping about the thing that made you weep and you're weeping about the weeping.

And you're weeping about two things instead of one thing. And there's only, listen, you're going to sink under that. One thing at a time is all we can take. So adjust your expectations. Number one, expect tears.

Sowing Tears for a Harvest of Joy

Secondly, invest your tears. Now, I'm using that word deliberately because we're modern people and we live in New York, but actually the metaphor is a little different. You'll see what I mean. Here's the metaphor, and it's a very interesting thing that the psalmist says in verse 5 and 6.

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. Now, at first, that doesn't look like something all unusual.

First of all, farmers go out to sow seed. And someday, I mean, it doesn't happen right away, but after a while, someday, they come back and they're filled with joy because they've gone out and there's sheaves coming up, and they harvest the sheaves and they come back.

So that's no big deal, right? We all know that when farmers go out after they've sown the seeds and at a certain time in the time of harvest, they come back with songs of joy. But it's saying something else here, and here's why.

It's true that all farmers go out, come back with sheaves of joy, I mean, with songs of joy. But do they go out weeping as they sow? What's going on here? This is a poetic image, and here's the poetic image.

The poetic image is the farmer is going out sowing tears or else, perhaps, watering their seed with tears. You know, the poetic image is a little ambiguous, but that's the job of poetry. It's here to evoke, and this is what it's telling us.

Number one, do not avoid your tears, but on the other hand, don't just express your tears. You have to plant your tears. You have to sow your tears. Think about it. There's two ways. Remember we said religious people tend to stuff their feelings and secular people tend to just express them.

But neither of those things are envisioned here because if you take your seed and just sit on it, you'll never have a harvest, will you? But on the other hand, if you take your big bag of seed, walk six feet on out into the field and just dump it and come home, you're not going to have a harvest either.

You can't stuff your seed and you can't dump your seed. You have to plant it. In other words, we're being told or being called to plant, to sow your tears, to see your tears as an opportunity for fruitfulness and growth.

Now, there's a book I read some years ago that I don't remember anything about the inside of the book. I don't think it was a great book, but I love the title. Never forgotten the title. It's helped me over the years, and the title was Don't Waste Your Sorrows.

Don't waste your sorrows. See, that's very different. That's not a masochistic idea where it says, you know, embrace your sorrows. It's not saying that. But on the other hand, it's not a hedonistic spirit that says avoid sorrows.

It says when the sorrows come, invest them. Plant them. See, investing, I figured it was something I ought to say to you because most of you probably don't work on a farm. And yet, you know, investing is the same idea.

You don't just dump your money. You invest it. You find a place. You send it out. And if you've done it well, it brings in a return. And therefore, what we're told is we have to sow our tears. And look, what is the reward?

What is the result? What are the sheaves? It's joy. This is really a mind-boggling thing. This is going beyond what most of us would hope the Bible teaches. And it does. We hope the Bible teaches that tears give way to joy.

And, of course, that's what the Bible says. Psalm 30, verse 5 somewhere, I think it is. It says, Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. So, of course, the Bible teaches that tears give way to joy.

But this is deeper. This is more profound. This is saying that in the gospel, this is what the promise is. If you plant your tears, the tears produce joy. The tears don't just give way to joy. They produce joy.

We don't just wait for the tears to go away. We plant them. They produce joy. So that's the reason why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, 17, he says, For our slight momentary affliction is achieving an eternal weight of glory that outweighs everything.

Now, that's the NIV, the New International Version, that word achieving. You understand? It's producing. For our slight momentary affliction, we're not just waiting for it to go away. It's producing. It's achieving an eternal weight of glory.

It's glorifying us. It's changing us. It's bringing a harvest of joy into our heart. Or put it another way, the kind of joy you really need, the Bible says, is the kind of joy that is the product of tears.

There's a kind of joy that comes from avoiding tears. It doesn't really change you. There's a kind of joy that comes through the tears that does. Wow. So here's my question. Do you know how to do this?

Do you know how to sow your tears? Do you know how to plant them? Or do you just dump them or stuff them? Well, somebody says, actually all of you say, okay, how do I do that? Well, that's finally. You pray your tears.

Bringing Tears to God in Prayer

See, one of the things that's intriguing about Psalm 39 and Psalm 126 and all the laments or the laments, I don't ever know how to say it, they're prayers. They're white hot. But they come before God with the feelings, with the tears.

They come to God with the tears. And that's what transforms both the tears and the weeper. Now, let me give you three things that you've got to do in a sense. Let's press the image a little bit. You have to put your tears in prayer into three things, a realization of his grace, a vision of the cross, and an assurance of glory.

Realization of grace, a vision of the cross, and assurance of glory. You have to take your tears, and you have to think about these three things as you cry. Here, let me show you what I mean. First of all, the first thing that has to happen is you, and I mean this has to happen almost before you, you have to know this before you start crying, all right?

That's what I'm telling you now. None of you actually look like you're actually crying now. Okay, so let me tell you this. You have to realize that God in his grace understands. He understands your weeping.

It's safe to pour your heart out to him. This is the thing that really hit me. It came home a couple years ago. Psalm 39, I have put the first two verses, you see, on this sheet, is really the last two verses of Psalm 39, and because you don't have the whole psalm in front of you, you don't realize how amazing, how disturbing this psalm really is.

God's Grace and the Desperate Prayers of Psalm 39

These are the last two verses. Let me read them to you. It's the Psalm of David. Hear my prayer, O Lord. Listen to my cry for help. Be not deaf to my weeping, for I dwell with you as an alien, a stranger, as all my fathers were.

Look away from me, that I may rejoice again, before I depart and am no more. Now listen. Let me tell you a little personal story here. When I first, some years ago, started going through psalms and I got this psalm, I had trouble with it.

I'm a logical person. I'm a rational person, and it didn't fit. It didn't fit in my understanding of what it's supposed to be. Let me show you. All the psalms, especially the Psalms of David, they all are filled with wrestling and weeping and crying and shaking the fist at heaven and saying how long, but they always end on a note of triumph sometimes, but at least a note of trust or a note of confidence or a note of peace.

And that's how most of David's psalms end. So, for example, two of them that are very famous, Psalm 16 is filled with fears, but the last verse is, this is the last verse of Psalm 16, David says, finally, he says, you have made me known, you have made known to me the path of life.

You will fill me with joy in your face, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. Actually, the old King James says, in thy face is fullness of joy, and in thy right hand are pleasures forevermore. And at the end of Psalm 17, again, it's filled with crying out and tears and unhappiness.

But here's the last verse of Psalm 17. And I in righteousness will see your face. And when I awake, I will be satisfied with seeing your likeness. Now, here we have a Psalm of David, Psalm 39, and he's wrestling and he's weeping.

And at the very end, look how it ends. It ends in absolute theological incorrectness. Let me tell you what he's saying. Look at it. Look at it. And I'll paraphrase it. He is saying, look away from me.

Turn your face away from me. Depart from me that I might have a little bit of peace before I die. And that's how he ends his prayer. This is a unit. This is a prayer. It's a prayer of David. And it ends with such overwhelming feelings that he actually tells God to do the very opposite of what he should be saying to God.

We're not supposed to pray like this. We're not supposed to feel like this. We're not supposed to be like this. We're not supposed to talk like this. But he does. And the thing that used to bother me so much is I used to say, wait a minute.

What is this doing in my Bible? It's supposed to be telling me what to do. And here he's lost it. He's blown it. What is it doing here? Actually, there were a couple of times I said, what does this mean to the idea that the scriptures are without error?

Isn't this an error? Is this the way it's supposed to be? Are we supposed to do it this way? No. And then I came across a little note, just two sentences in a commentary on the book of Psalms by Derek Kidner.

I got a hold of this a few years ago, but it really didn't just give me some help for my intellectual conundrum. It also gave me a comfort I've never gotten over. This is what he says. He says, The prayer, look away from me, makes no more sense than Peter's depart from me.

Yet God knows when to treat this plea as he does when Peter says it in Luke 5 or when the crowd says it in Matthew 8, 34. But now here's the final sentence. The very presence of such prayers in the scripture is a witness to his understanding.

He knows how we speak when we are desperate. Now that, I'm sorry, I'm showing my age here. That blew my mind. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, that phrase still means something to me. It blew my mind. Why? I said to think.

But the very presence of such prayers in the scripture is a witness to his understanding. He knows how we speak when we're desperate. He understands when our feelings so overwhelm us that we say desperate things, incorrect things.

He understands so much, he puts an example in the scripture saying, It's safe to pray like this with me. It's safe to pour out your deepest feelings with me. In other words, Psalm 39 shows us where your deepest feelings, your anger, your tears, where they belong.

Where do they belong? Do they belong deep in your heart where you refuse to admit them or express them? Or do they really belong expressed, just dumped? Now listen, I'm all for talking to friends. I'm all for talking to counselors.

All right. But ultimately, where your tears belong is not managed and packaged and manicured in some little confessional prayer. They belong in pre-reflective outbursts from the very depth of your being in the presence of God.

Pre-reflective outbursts. God says, look at Psalm 39. This isn't the way you're supposed to speak. This isn't the way you're supposed to feel. But I want you to speak and feel in my presence. It's safe.

I understand what it's like to be desperate. So the first thing you've got to have, why? You have to have a realization of his grace. Why? Otherwise, you will not do that. You will not come to him. You'll either stuff him or dump him.

But you won't take him to him. Because you really say, I shouldn't be feeling like this. But he says in Psalm 39, he's saying it's safe to come to me. I'm a God of grace. I understand. Now, that's the first thing you've got to have.

The Cross and the Transformation of Tears

The second thing, so you have to plant your tears in a realization of his grace. The second thing, you have to plant your tears in a vision of the cross. And in some ways, this is the most important. Listen to me.

I know you are. You say, what else can I do? You've got the microphone. All right. Why is he so understanding? Why do we have a God who understands the cry of dereliction? Because we have the only God who even claims.

We have the only book. We have the only scripture that even claims that our God himself came down into this world, became a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, he said, my soul is sorrowful even unto death.

And what he was saying when he said that was, I think my sorrows are so great, they're going to kill me before I even get to the cross. God knows what it's like. God knows what it's like to look to God and to have heaven barred, apparently.

You see, God knows what it's like to look to heaven and to feel nothing. God knows what it's like to give a cry of dereliction, the cry of desperation. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And here's the reason why he's able to keep coming to us even after we said, turn away.

Why can he say, why will he keep coming to us? Why would he even put it in Psalm 39 as an invitation? Why would he say, keep coming to me, even though you said turn away? Because when Jesus Christ himself said, come to me, God turned away from him.

In other words, Jesus got the abandonment we deserved. Jesus was calling for God, and God turned his face away. So that when we say to God, turn your face away, God will come. Because he experienced what we should have received.

And therefore, he can be understanding. And when we see him on the cross, and we put our tears in the vision of the cross, this is what I mean. On the cross, we see the deep magic, in a sense. You know, C .S. Lewis talked about deep magic.

The medieval alchemists were looking for a magic way to turn lead into gold, right? But this is the magic that will turn your tears into gold. If you look at Jesus on the cross crying, why me? Why have you forsaken me?

You will still cry sometimes, why me? But you'll never cry, why me, the same. When I see Jesus Christ on the cross, I see tears producing joy. Jesus Christ did not save us just by getting through the tears.

His tears produced the joy. His tears produced the joy of our welcome into the bosom of God. And that means that whenever we see that, here's what we do. Take your tears, and think about him crying out on the cross.

Think about him looking for God, and God turning away from him. And here's what's going to happen. The first thing that's going to happen is, your tears are going to change, because we have a tendency, when bad things happen to us, to feel guilty.

Right? Don't we say that? We say, what's wrong? Am I being punished? Am I a bad person? Get rid of that. How? You look at the cross, and you say, wait a minute. Even though I feel like I'm being abandoned by God, I'm not.

Even though I feel like God's punishing for my sins, he's not. Why? Because he was punished for my sins. Even though I feel like God's abandoning me, it's only an apparent abandonment, because on the cross, Jesus got real abandonment.

And so if you ever feel, during your suffering, that God has rejected you, abandoned you, or you feel like a terrible person, you feel like a guilty, shameful person, that's because you haven't planted your tears in the vision of the cross.

You're not looking at him dying for you. That means that God is not rejecting you. Jesus was rejected for you. So plant your tears, and you'll get rid of that unnecessary guilt. Secondly, plant your tears in the vision of the cross, and here's something else that'll happen.

You'll get rid of that self-pity. The thing that'll kill you. Weeping is fine. Weeping in grief is fine. Weeping in disappointment is fine. Jesus was always weeping, but weeping in self-pity, ah, that will make you a small little person, someone who can't forgive, someone who is always feeling ill-used, someone who gets incredibly touchy and incredibly oversensitive.

So what are you going to do? Look at the cross and say, You have really suffered for me. My sufferings are nothing compared to yours. If you suffered for me, I can be patient with this suffering for you.

Thirdly, what if you're weeping and you're saying, I don't see what God is doing in this. You're impatient. Your tears are impatient. And you say, I don't see what God is doing. Look at the cross again.

And think of all the people who went home that night, who saw Jesus Christ dying on the cross, which was the greatest act of wisdom and salvation and grace and love in the history of the world, and who went home and lost their faith.

I always think about that. Do you? Do you realize how many people looked at Jesus dying on the cross because they couldn't understand it? They said, I don't even believe in God anymore. I don't see what good God could be bringing out of this.

So they looked right in the face of the greatest thing God ever did and said, Because I don't understand it, therefore, my faith is undermined. When you see Jesus dying on the cross and you can't figure out what God is doing in your life, remember that.

The impatience, the self-pity, the unnecessary guilt, those are the things, if you plant your seed, if you plant your tears in the vision of the cross, those things are combed out and you'll start to become more like him.

You'll just start to be humbled by the tears instead of becoming proud. You'll start to feel more sensitive to other people instead of more self-absorbed. In other words, plant your tears in a realization of his grace.

Plant your tears in a vision of his glory, pardon me, a vision of the cross. And lastly, the last thing, plant your tears in an assurance of his glory. The last verse says, He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, might return with songs of joy.

Is that what it says? Possibly will. Who knows but? No. It says, he who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy. I was reading a very good book on the Psalms by Eugene Peterson called Answering God.

Assurance of Glory and the End of Prayer

And when he got to the last, you know, the last five Psalms are Psalm 146 to 150. And there are nothing but praise psalms. There's nothing in there but praise. There's no lamentation. There's no confession.

There's no meditation. There's no thanks. It's just praise, praise, praise, praise. Why? And this is what Peterson says. He says, we have to realize what the Psalms are teaching us is that all true prayer pursued far enough will become praise.

Any prayer, no matter how desperate its origin, no matter how angry and fearful the experience in traverses, ends up in praise. It does not always get there quickly, does not always get there easily. In fact, the trip can take a lifetime.

But the end is always praise. There are intimations of this throughout the Psalms. This is not to say that other prayers are inferior to praise, only that all prayer pursued far enough becomes praise.

Don't rush it. Don't try to push it. It may take years. It may take decades before certain prayers arrive at the hallelujahs at Psalm 150. Not every prayer is capped off with praise. In fact, most prayers of the Psalms are a true guide or not.

But prayer is always reaching in toward praise and will finally arrive there. So our lives fill out in goodness. Earth and heaven meet in an extraordinary conjunction. Clashing symbols announce the glory.

Blessing. Amen. Hallelujah. Do you know the joy that's inevitably coming? If you know that, I'll tell you the reason why I'm afraid to weep. When you actually feel sorrow, there's a part of your heart that says it's never going to get any better.

This is the way it's always going to be. There's a fear. You know, there's a place where C .S. Lewis, when he started grieving over his wife when she died, he says, nobody told me grief was so much like fear.

You're afraid to weep. You're afraid you're never going to stop. But if you know that all prayer will end in praise, that we're going to be with him forever, that frees you to get involved with people's lives even though you know it's going to make you weep.

Are you happy enough to be a weeper? Are you assured of the glory enough to not be afraid to weep in repentance, to be quick to repent, fast to repent? Because, you know, tears produce joy. Are you happy enough in order to get involved in the lives and the hurts of the people of the city?

Hope for New York says get involved. We have a ministry fair. Get involved in the needs of the city. It might make you weep. Are you happy enough for that? If you are, the tears you experience in ministry, the tears you experience in repentance, the tears you experience in friendships will produce a harvest of joy for the people around you and for your own heart.

Prayer for Grace to Sow Our Tears

Let's pray. Father, make us happy enough to weep. Help us to know how to sow our tears. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.