“Thou dost give them to drink of the river of Thy delights” (Psalm 36:8).
My friend told me she had read something I’d written and wept. I asked what had prompted that. She replied, “It was just the Lord. They were good tears.”
That’s all she said.
I know the feeling.
Any tears I shed come in one of three situations. I’m traveling down the highway talking to the Lord or going over a sermon and become so carried away with the joy of the Lord that the tears flow.
I’m on my knees with my face buried in a couch cushion, sometimes saying nothing, and I tear up.
Or, I’m at this laptop tapping out insights from God’s word and His promises and am overwhelmed by His goodness. (Such as at this moment.)
Men always want their wives to say why they’re crying. I quit that long ago when my wife Margaret had no answer. “I just am. I’m a woman and sometimes we cry.” Basically, that was no answer, but it was all I was going to get.
Being a man, I want to know why I cry.
And I think I know.
My tears are made up of several components in the same way that the great Mississippi River which flows unendingly down that massive channel about 3 blocks below where I lived for 26 years is formed from various waters. The Father of All Rivers, aka the Big Muddy, receives input from the Allegheny and the Ohio, the Susquehanna and the Missouri, from streams and creeks and runoffs from fields far and near, an area stretching from western New York to eastern Montana. An incredible basin.
It’s not all just from one source.
Why are my tears flowing? Well, they are….