Looking behind me, I realized I had not completely tightened my Stanley tumbler when I walked upstairs to my study. As I followed the water spots, drying them with a paper towel, Lori asked what had happened.
“It looks like I left a veritable ‘trail of tears,'” I joked.
The actual Trail of Tears was no laughing matter. In the 1830s, the Federal Government forced the removal of over 60,000 Native Americans from their homelands in the southeast United States to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Thousands died along the journey. Some historians have referred to it as an act of “ethnic cleansing” and others as “genocide.”
The Trail of Tears wasn’t the first such terrible act in history. Humans have managed to do worse: more recently, the Darfur genocide in Sudan, with the displacement of close to 3 million people and around 300,000 killed. Then there’s the Islamic State persecution of Iraqi Turkish, as well as the Yazidi genocide in Iraq and Syria that continues. Some of us remember the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s. The Holocaust takes our breath away; it’s so horrific it’s the “gold standard” for genocides. I haven’t touched on recent events in Ukraine or the Middle East. It’s too much.
Jeremiah warned the Hebrew people what the Babylonians would do to them. The “enemy from the north” would swoop down, destroy their temple, viciously murder many, and displace others. It happened. One of the survivors wrote about it: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Jerusalem” (Psalm 137:1).
The Bible doesn’t gloss over the capacity humans have for hurting each other, the evil we have inflicted on others. It’s part of our sad and shameful condition.
Maybe that’s why the Bible contains over 500 references to tears and crying. God doesn’t make light of our tears: “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle” (Psalm 56:8).
Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would be a “man of sorrows, familiar with suffering.” No doubt, since the Messiah would redeem humans from their sins, taking our evil upon himself.
But that’s not the whole story. It’s not all sadness and sorrow.
After my “trail of tears” remark, Lori responded, “Well, it doesn’t have to be.”
Knowing she has experienced her share of tears in life’s losses, I paused from where I was cleaning on my hands and knees and looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Not all tears have to be of sadness,” she said.
We also know tears of joy, celebration, compassion, and forgiveness after repentance. The Bible records those, too. “Those that sow in tears shall reap in joy” (Psalm 126:5).
Though we walk in a valley of tears, there is a promise of joy on the other side. When Jesus endured the cross, taking all our sorrow and pain upon himself, he endured it, the Bible says, “for the joy that lay before him” (Hebrews 12:2).
As painful as our trail of tears can be, there is the promise of joy. “He will wipe away every tear,” the Apostle John promised of heaven. (Revelation 21:4).
I have wondered, in those lonely, heavy moments, if when we arrive in heaven, the Lord will hand us our personalized bottle of tears, filled with our history of sorrows, which we, I imagine, will receive in gratitude, fully aware that he knew our pain, and looking up into the eyes of Jesus, who absorbed them all, we realize the bottle has disappeared, vanished, for we are in a place where there will be
No more tears.