Cassie Thornburg | World Missions
I sat in another waiting room, wondering if the doctors would be able to figure out what was going on. During the last three months of constant health issues, I’d been unable to digest much food, and my core problem was still undiagnosed.
I was 25, and my health was failing me—and I felt like my prayers and hope in God were failing me, too. My second year as an iEDGEr serving in Auckland, New Zealand had brought so much wrestling, grief, and confusion. Had I heard from God wrong? I was walking through the hardest thing I’d ever done, seven thousand miles away from home and my family and friends. This anxiety brought so much shame as I thought, “As a missionary, shouldn’t I be able to handle this better? Is my faith not strong enough?”
The truth was, I had never wrestled with God this deeply before, and I feared maybe He wouldn’t hold up. I became disillusioned by the God I thought I knew.
Reading the Psalms became my solace. I sat in them day in and day out. The cries and remembrances of God brought comfort and hope that no other part of Scripture could. I realized some of my views of God were being shattered, and I also found God was still there, giving me a fuller, deeper, and richer picture of Himself. Just like some flowers only bloom at night, there are things about God we only come to know by walking through the dark.
It gave me a picture of a God who wasn’t just working despite my tears, but who was even working in my tears. This painful season was forming something I had never received before: an image of the God who is not immune to suffering and tears, and who was near to me in them.
I have come to appreciate the phrase, “And He will wipe away every tear” (Revelation 21:4). It could’ve just said, “God will do away with suffering,” but it doesn’t. Instead, it gives this personal image of a father bending down and drawing near enough to look us in the eyes, gently wiping away the tears. It’s the image of a God who draws near and intimately knows and sees our tears, who honors them. I’ll leave with an excerpt from my favorite book, Prayer in the Night by Tish Harrison Warren:
“The image of God wiping away our tears could of course be a metaphor—a statement that all things will, at last, be well. But what if it’s not strictly poetic language? What if, in the face of our Maker, we get one last chance to honor all the losses this life has brought? What if we can stand before God someday and hear our life stories, told for the first time accurately and in their entirety, with all the twists and turns and meaning we couldn’t follow when we lived through them? What if the story includes all the darkness of suffering, all the wounds we’ve received and given to others, all the horror of … death, and we get to weep one last time with God himself? What if before we begin to live in a world where all things are made new, we weep with the One who alone is able to permanently wipe away our tears?”
May you know the comfort of the God who meets you in your tears.
