I Cried Over It And Felt Ridiculous

You were not expecting it.

You went over to water it, the way you have a hundred times, and you saw the state of it and something went straight through you and you were crying at the counter.

And it lasted maybe forty seconds. And then the second thing arrived, which was worse.

You thought: it is a plant.

And you wiped your face and you finished the watering and you were embarrassed in an empty room, in front of nobody, about a feeling that nobody saw.

That second thing is what I want to deal with. Not the crying. The crying was fine. The crying was the only honest thing in the kitchen that morning.

The apologizing is what did the damage.

Thou tellest my wanderings

David writes a line in Psalm fifty six that I want you to actually look at, because it is stranger than people notice.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Put thou my tears into thy bottle.

You are weeping in front of somebody who collects it rather than measures it, and no tear of yours has ever once been sorted into worth keeping and not worth keeping. Psalm 56:8 says put thou my tears into thy bottle, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a woman apologizing in an empty kitchen.

Look at the picture. A bottle. Not a ledger with a column for justified and a column for excessive. A container, into which the whole of it goes.

And then the question at the end of the verse, which is not really a question: are they not in thy book.

Written down. Recorded. Kept.

Now hold that against the thing you did four seconds after you stopped crying, which was to conduct a hearing about whether the crying was proportionate. God did not run that hearing. God got out a bottle.

You were never assessed for that, and no one in heaven has ever once weighed a tear against its occasion. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a body, and it is the written word of Psalm 56 and not my opinion that describes the bottle.

Why it was never about the plant

Here is the practical half, and it is about you rather than about the pot.

Tears have almost nothing to do with the size of their occasion. Everybody knows this and almost nobody grants themselves the benefit of it.

A person can bury a parent dry eyed and then fall apart six weeks later over a parking ticket. The parking ticket is not the subject. The parking ticket is the place where the pressure finally found a seam.

A plant going down in front of you is a very good seam. It is a living thing, in your house, that you have been tending, that is going, and that you cannot save. If there were anything at all sitting under the surface of your life about tending, or about losing, or about trying and it not being enough, that pot is precisely where it would come out.

You are a woman carrying more than a plant, and forty seconds at a kitchen counter has never once been the whole account of what you are carrying. The Spirit of God is the one who knows what the seam really was, and Psalm 56:8 says the tears go in the bottle without being itemized first.

And notice, please, that this is not me telling you the crying was secretly about something bigger and therefore permitted. It would be permitted anyway.

That is the actual point. The permission is not granted by the size of the cause. It is already there in the bottle.

You have already been given the freedom to feel exactly what you felt, and no explanation has ever once been required before the tears were kept. The Holy Spirit is the one who hands that over without conditions, and it stands in Psalm 56 that they are written in the book.

The apologizing is the part to stop

So the instruction here is not to cry more and it is not to cry less.

It is to stop the hearing.

The hearing goes like this. Something real happens in your body. Then a voice arrives, in a very reasonable tone, and asks whether that was appropriate. And the rest of the day gets spent quietly filing a defense.

That voice sounds like maturity. It is not. Maturity is being able to feel a thing and let it be the size it actually was.

You are already grown enough to let a feeling stand at its own size, and a voice that sounds reasonable has never once been the same as a voice that is right. The Holy Spirit is the one who tells those two apart, and Psalm 56:8 is the written ground: the tears go into the bottle unweighed.

The fastest way I know to shut the hearing down is to say the thing out loud, in the plainest possible words, with no justification attached. Not to a person. To the room.

I cried about my plant and that was allowed.

It will feel absurd the first time. Say it anyway. A sentence said out loud has a different weight than a thought, and the hearing cannot really survive being spoken to.

You are able to end a trial that nobody else is attending, and saying one plain sentence out loud has never once been self indulgence. Psalm 56:8 has the tears kept and recorded already, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a spoken sentence do what a thought cannot.