Bottles

I was telling my husband about the times I have cried while watching the news.

I cried watching the tragedy at Waco, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the OJ verdict.  I cried viewing the images of Katrina and the Tsunami of 2004, the devastation of 9-11, and the earthquake in Haiti.

You could say I’m a blubbering mess.

But, I also cry at happy things, too…

Like when my daughter was born and I could not believe it was all over. And just beginning.

Or the many, many times in church when God brought me to my knees over the awesomeness of His Love.

Tears are funny. Sometimes the taste of them reminds us of pain, sometimes grief, sometimes joy or laughter.

The Bible tells us that God has kept all of our tears  in a bottle. That image is amazing to me. I’ve always thought that people save things in bottles that are precious to them. I suppose our tears are precious to God, special enough to save and keep, to hold and look at, reminders of our humanness and our deep need for Him.

I picture rows upon rows of bottles in God’s closet, not in the literal sense of course.

Rows of different bottles made of different colored glass. Some of them with corks, others caps. All of them are filled with tears. Each tear represents something in our lives that God fully understands. He looks at our tears with complete compassion and love.

Somewhere in the midst of millions of bottles, I imagine a tiny bottle without a cap made of rose-colored glass and filled with tears. One tear is from a broken heart in high school, one from a news broadcast, and the other a birth.

The bottle rests on a shelf in a closet and there on its label it reads, “Melanie.”

And that just makes me want to cry.

“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”  Psalms 56:8 (NLT)

Melanie

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