Significance

“Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” - Psalms 56:8

Just how special are you? A clue comes from modern pathology science which has discovered the unique, special mark that each person carries within their DNA. A recent crime story took this simple fact one step further as investigators solved an abduction and murder case involving a 5 year old girl by analyzing the tear stains on the passenger side of her killer’s car. There, within those stains, was found the unmistakable proof of the little girl’s DNA identity. How poignant that this little girl’s tears solved her own murder case. How incredibly powerful is the knowledge that our tears are uniquely laced with our own one-of-a-kind personhood.

In ancient times, we are told that mourners at funerals would collect their tears in little bottles and place them with the body upon burial. Evidence of this has been found in tombs in Rome and Palestine sometimes in great profusion. From this we can flesh out the picture of Psalm 56:8 where God is said to collect our tears in His bottle; or as the indelible stains upon the pages of our record. Our tears are uniquely our own, and our God knows them all.

Two lessons come clear to me upon reflection on this truth. One, each one of us is completely different from all other persons who have ever walked on the earth or will take breath in this world. When the Scriptures talk about a victim’s blood crying out from the ground for justice, we know now that every drop of our blood has our name on it. We are imprinted from birth with a mark that sets us apart from all others. When lost in a large crowd of thousands or imagine ourselves swallowed up amidst the millions of China, we need never lose track of our own unique significance in the eyes of God. And, in fact, He has numbered the very hairs of our head. He sees the sparrow fall but proclaims we are of far greater worth. Such knowledge is too high for me. I cannot attain to it. Yet it is sweetly comforting.

Secondly, God has ordained that we live such lives where tears are inevitable. Sorrow and grief follow in our steps as surely as death follows life. Ever since our expulsion from the garden, pain and suffering are an endemic part of our lives. At one time, my immature thoughts considered pain as either the result of my own poor thought processes or someone else’s. If we were just smart enough, pain could be avoided altogether. Either that or pain was just a result of some bad luck which, like lightning, strikes without cause or warning: a twist of cruel but random fate. I see pain and suffering now as more a constant part of the fabric of our lives: as destined for us as earning our bread by the sweat of our brow.

Yet God, Himself, stepped into our world and took on the limitations and pain of man. Dorothy Sayers wrote, “For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death – He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine… He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”* We, too, can walk this vale of tears and find it all worthwhile. Especially as we know we are uniquely significant. Not only that, but we are hovered over by the lover of our souls, one who has experienced all the limitations of the flesh, who keeps a record of all our tears until the day when all sorrow shall cease; no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying when He will wipe away every tear.

*Dorothy Sayers, Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 4.