By Lori Boyd
Two summers ago, while staying at the beach, I had some time alone with my grandmother. She had come into the kitchen to talk to me as I stood ironing clothes for the kids. I don’t recall every detail of our conversation, but I do remember that Granny talked about an inspiring letter she had received from a dear friend. It was not uncommon for Granny to become emotional when speaking of her family, friends, and faith, and since crying is one of the things I do best, together we were a regular tear-fest! That afternoon we had a good cry while she taught me something wonderful about God.
Gran talked to me about David: a man after God’s own heart but who struggled with sin and faced difficult trials. She told me about a verse in the Bible that refers to God keeping David’s tears in a bottle and how that thought has helped her many times to not feel forgotten in times of sadness. At the moment, Gran could not pinpoint the chapter and verse, and without Google we spent quite a bit of time flipping through our Bibles trying to find the Scripture. One year passed and while I hadn’t forgotten my talk with Granny, I had failed to look further into the precious idea of God collecting tears.
One morning I found it! I was reading my Bible at the kitchen table and came across Psalm 56:8 which says, “You number my wanderings, put my tears in Your bottle; are they not in Your book?” I wish that I could have called my grandmother and told her that I remembered our talk that afternoon and that I found the Scripture she had told me about. She died shortly after that trip to the beach. Granny is now in a place where she will never shed another tear, but her final gift to me lives on as a new perspective of peace in the face of sorrow.
God knew David. He knew David’s struggles, He saw what steered David off course; He understood what brought David down. God accounted for everything that David experienced in His book; nothing was unseen or forgotten. God is not so removed from us that He doesn’t know what makes us hurt!
The idea of putting tears in a bottle could be a reference to a lachrymatory, which was a vase used for catching the tears of mourners in Bible times. It is a beautiful thought that God collected David’s tears and kept them in His bottle. He had in His remembrance those things that caused David grief.
As a child of God I can know with confidence that God catches my tears in His bottle too and records my afflictions and adversities in His book. While He commands my respect and obedience, He also watches over me with tenderness, compassion, and concern in times of trouble and distress.
If Granny were here, I would thank her for telling me about David’s tears. I would thank her for the simple conversation we had at the beach that, though at the time I didn’t realize it, would so deeply strengthen my faith and my relationship with God. She had a wonderful way of doing that.
