“Weeping is not the same thing as crying, It takes your whole body to weep, and when it`s over, you feel like you don`t have any bones left to hold you up.” -Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer
Last night I wept. And when I say wept, it was exactly as described above: I wept until my bones couldn’t hold me up anymore and my body shut down. I wept for hours; I wept until I couldn’t weep anymore. My heart is broken right now; there are some people in life that I love dearly who are in tremendous pain and it’s pain that I can’t change or help. My helplessness and inability to make any tangible difference to their pain makes my heart ache even more. Life is messy though, and sometimes when we find ourselves in the midst of the mess, weeping is the first step of acknowledgment of how deep the pain in our own hearts actually goes. Today I am exhausted from my own tears of yesterday, but strangely alive in the knowledge of the capacity of the human heart to love. Love and compassion run deeper in my veins than I ever knew, and every tear I wept last night was an expression of that love.
There is comfort to me in knowing that Jesus wept too. Raw, full-body crying is not only okay, it is sometimes necessary. My weeping didn’t solve anything last night — it didn’t fix the pain, the sickness, the problems, or the circumstances of the people over whom I was crying — but it did allow me to honor them with all of my heart. Weeping felt like a full body prayer. It was everything that I could possibly give when there really isn’t anything that can be done.
Whatever pain you are holding in, be courageous and let it out. Let your heart bleed out the pain that it feels and stop holding it in. Honor the love that you have for others, get angry at the injustices of the world, and stand up against the sickness that hurt the people we love. It’s going to hurt, but life hurts and to get to the place of peace you must first go through the pain. I am not at peace yet, but I am on my way there and more than that, my heart is overflowing with a desire to love more than I have felt in months combined. Weeping awakens the soul. Weep on.