Can God Really Hold the World’s Tears?
Nobody told me my thirties meant the names on my prayer sheets would be filled up with family members. They didn’t tell me funerals would become commonplace; that I’d watch my childhood friend grieve the loss of a parent. Truth be told, I wasn’t ready for this yet.
One Sunday morning tears came to my eyes over the suffering that seemed to amass each day. I turned my head to glance at those standing next to me. Together we sang, “Though winds of change may rage tomorrow, God is at your side, No longer dread, The fires of unexpected sorrow.”
What unexpected sorrows did they dread? I looked over the faces of my brothers and sisters next to me and wondered what weights they bore along with me. Some I knew, some I could only imagine.
The prevalence of suffering can feel too hard for us to bear. Friends lose another baby. Others end another year of chronic pain they can’t shake. A primary breadwinner loses a job. A family friend walks away from the faith. We don’t need to go far to see reminders of deadly outbreaks, persecution in the global church, or earthquakes leaving cities demolished.
We pray that God would comfort, but sometimes we might wonder if can God truly hold us all?
Some days it’s too much for our brains to imagine. It’s easier to focus on our immediate, individual needs. To shut the world out and focus solely on his redemption in our own struggles. Yet when we constantly do this, we miss out on something important. By zooming out to see God as the comforter of not just our own sorrows but the burdens of many gives us an important angle of hope and assurance in the midst of our own struggles.
HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD
Our culture has trained us to focus on our own personal lives. In turn, we might grab God’s promises but move quickly to how we can “use” them for ourselves. Pragmatism is the rule of our age. But in the process of streamlining his words for our comfort, we miss his all-encompassing mightiness. He is not just the God who comforts us. He is the God who comforts millions.
He can and does hold the parents weeping over their stillborn baby just as he comforts the pastor sitting in a prison. He can and does comfort the widow mourning her husband, as well as the tears of the exhausted parent. He is showing his kindness, his nearness, his covenant-keeping love to every member of your church family sitting next to you on Sunday mornings—just as he is to you. And he has been doing it for the saints since even before the Corinthian churches heard Paul’s words, “Blessed be the God of comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions” (2 Cor. 1:3).
God holds them all, as he holds the galaxies in place, as he spins the earth each day, and as he sends forth the rain and snow from their storehouses (Job 38:22). He holds you in your pain because he holds every single one of us.
In Surprised by Paradox, Jen Pollock Michel writes, “Only when we see the disaster as too extensive, our capacity as too limited, only when we finally admit our powerlessness are we readied for lament––readied to bring the divine business back to its rightful owner.”
Often, we can’t bear the weight of the news and painful updates that come before our eyes each day. We may turn to our own coping mechanisms to process and grieve through sorrow that’s too extensive. Yet God does not. He is perfect in all his ways (Ps. 18:30). He does not tire (Isa. 40:28), or need a moment, or get overwhelmed by the cries of his people. When they mourn, he will comfort (Matt. 5:4).
NOT I/ME BUT US/WE
We find this kind of community-driven perspective throughout all the pages of God’s Word. While the Bible has deep and lasting personal application, it’s a book written to a collective people. Most of the Bible’s commands and promises are not written to an individual but to a group.
When God says nothing shall separate us from the love of Christ (Rom. 8:35), he is speaking to millions. When he says that the Lord is close to the brokenhearted, he is speaking of many. And when he says that you will not be overwhelmed by the waters (Isa. 42:2–3), he is talking to a nation, and in turn showing his covenant love to a people as numerous as the skies. Do we feel the weight of that?
Meditating on the comfort of the Lord for his collective people should give us a great hope. These truths remind us that we all enter into what pastor and writer Evan Welcher defines as “The Fellowship of the Suffering.” We suffer together, and we are comforted together.
As we suffer together, we are able to point each other to the comfort of Christ, which is great enough for all of us. As Welcher writes, “The goal of discipleship in the midst of suffering must be comfort in Christ, for the closer we walk with the Lord Jesus, the more we see of the massive burden he always carries on our behalf.”
He bears all our loads each day, and yet he is near enough to each to catch every hidden tear in a bottle (Ps. 56:8). The prayers we offer up to God on behalf of ourselves and others are not just lip-service, but petitions to the rightful owner of our suffering.
SAFE IN HIS HANDS
In his comments on God’s comfort, Paul goes on to tell the Corinthians that God comforts us “so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:4).
I used to see this verse as very linear, as if the flow chart of God’s comfort spreads to me, then once through that trial, an arrow then extends from me to another. But do we ever really come through our suffering victorious?
After seasons of difficulty in my own life, I’ve found the only one with the victory is the one who bought it for me in the first place. The grand advice I thought I’d have was replaced simply by a person to point towards. Now I see the flow chart beginning with God and an arrow pointing to each one of us. Some arrows extend horizontally between his people, as they comfort those in similar trials. But we’re all in his hand, depending on the kindness and comfort of our Shepherd, as we walk through valleys and mountains (Ps.23). We never graduate. Instead, we simply find we can turn our heads to each other in similar battles with a tearful but powerful message:
“He held me too.”
In a world where bad news and prayer requests can flood our phones in minutes, maybe we need to take some time to draw back and meditate on the ability of the Lord.
He is mighty, he is near, and he is able to hold us all.
Brianna Lambert is a wife and mom to three, making their home in the cornfields of Indiana. She loves using writing to work out the truths God is teaching her each day. She is a staff writer with GCD and has contributed to various online publications, such as Morning by Morning and Fathom magazine. You can find more of her writing paired with her husband’s photography at lookingtotheharvest.com.