What if tears are a sign of God?

Willing to weep

Jesus wept. —John 11:35

A friend told me something the other day that’s been surfacing in my spirit ever since. She was in a busy airport with the echo of voices and announcements blaring overhead, where people rush past with roller bags and coffee cups, the air thick with movement and hurry.

Right there, in the middle of chaos, a man with a cello set down his case. He took out the instrument, rested it against his body, and touched the bow to string. And something shifted.

Something tender unfolded. It was as if the chaos itself pushed paused and the noise was willing, just for a moment, to make room.

People began to gather, drawn the way a windowsill fern leans toward the light. The sound held both grief and wonder, the kind only a cello can carry—notes that feel like memory, like prayer, like something deep remembering how to speak.

A man nearby began to weep—silent tears slipping freely down his face. People set down their suitcases. Mothers stopped mid-step with strollers. And for a moment, in all that motion and noise, the world felt human again. Real. Close. Together.

I’ve noticed that I’m drawn to people who cry in public. I don't cry much in public, but I am making it one of my gentle aspirations. If I cried more easily in public, it would mean my soul and my body were walking together step by step. That my mind and heart were breathing in rhythm together to the pace with the Holy Spirit.

In the spiritual life, we are amphibious creatures made to breathe both Spirit and air. When I’m living in this integrated spiritual habitat, I’m more likely to feel the rush of tears come to my eyes.

I felt the rush of tears this week with my dad after his surgery. I felt it watching a movie about children being sent away from London on trains during the war. I felt it again and again, watching images out of Gaza that I didn’t know how to hold, and struggled to stay with. And once, just the other morning, it came again—my eyes pricked at the sight of a Kentucky sunrise in a video a friend sent me: soft fields lit up with gold, like glory spilling over the horizon.

To live in that tender place, where tears are always just a breath away— that’s the place I want to keep finding. The place where Spirit and flesh meet. Where the heart knows what the body is communicating. Where I breathe both kinds of air.

When we are tender enough to cry, it is a reminder of the that life is bounded by time and human bodies, and we have little ability to control much of anything. It is willingness to stand at the doorway of our mortality and see wonder, quiet grief and sacred curiosity instead of fear.

Living in that tender place—where tears are close and curiosity lingers—softens the edges of our resistance. It’s here, in the quiet vulnerability of our hearts, that we begin to receive suffering not as a weight to crush us, but as a strange, sacred gift.

When we let ourselves be this open and offer our whole selves as living sacrifices, breathing Spirit and air together, we step into a mystery. The cross we bear shifts from burden to doorway. Pain to passage. A conduit of grace.

Receiving suffering willingly does not make it easier. The pain remains. But in that surrender, the Spirit moves through us, weaving strength into every delicate and fragile fiber of our being. It is here in the tender crossing of grief and wonder that our spirit, soul, and body are bound together in quiet resilience.

To live tenderly, to stay near the well of tears, is to practice the holy willingness to embrace whatever comes with a heart open wide to God’s presence, even in the shadow of the cross.

The deeper life in God makes you willing to weep. It is not all head and hands, doing and working. The deeper life in God takes us to a place of surrender and with that comes with the tender place to allow the rush of tears to spill over onto your face, to drip down on to your lap, to hold pain for someone else even more a moment.

What if weeping was a sign of the presence of God just as much as joy?

What if when someone cried in public over the plight of starving children or over a broken relationship or another's physical pain and we knew it as the Presence of Jesus?

What if the tears that touch your face are a sign of holiness and consecration?

Dear friend of the Deeper Life, this week, let’s cry more quickly and more tenderly. Let’s grieve the pain that belongs to someone else. Let’s take note of the rush of tears that reminds us of the raw and terrible beauty of being human.

I wonder if we will find more of the Holy Spirit as we are willing to weep.