An e-mail from a well-spoken friend contained this phrase I couldn’t stop turning over in my head. She referred to someone she loved crying “the good kind of cry,” and I felt instinctively what those few simple words conveyed.

Some tears are so unbidden, and pure, and necessary that they cleanse and heal, almost without us. Such tears are the essential lubricant for what my friend described as that “good kind of cry”.

They can’t be conjured any more than they can be quieted. They simply are, for as long as they need to be. They aren’t manipulative, or especially dramatic, or perhaps even readily visible. But these tears can speak volumes when words won’t do at all. And they can respond with powerful eloquence when the muscles of our faces or arms or legs are rendered frozen and still.

The good kind of cry is called out by purest beauty…or heartbreak…or joy…or unfettered worship. “Old Yeller” may have been my first experience of it (pure heartbreak), but the good kind of cry surprised me again just a few days ago when a classically-trained opera singer offered a simple song called “Lamb of God” in a morning worship service. The notes she hit and held bypassed rational thought and pierced my heart before I could defend myself. It was definitely “the good kind of cry.”

The good kind of cry has ambushed me as I’ve stood before paintings in the Museé d’Orsay, and as I’ve watched a newborn baby’s jerky hands and feet move out of rhythm, jabbing air. They’ve washed my face more than once when a golden, round moon has hung low in the nighttime sky, and when I’ve been surprised awake by the smallest hint of the big-time love of God.

I used to be ashamed of the “good kind of cry” tears, but I’m not so much, anymore. Sometimes I don’t even bother to wipe them away. I just let them fall. And when I do, I remember this verse that I stumbled on years ago, and still love just as much as I did when I first read it: Thou hast taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Thy bottle; are they not in Thy book? (Psalm 56:8) I don’t have to catch them. They’re precious to the One who calls them forth, and He saves each one.

So the next time they well up in you – don’t fight it. Go ahead. Welcome “the good kind of cry” and the tears that come with it. In the presence of our beautiful, awesome God, it’s altogether fitting that they fall.

“And standing behind Him at His feet, weeping, she began to wet His feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing His feet, and anointing them with…perfume.” (Luke 7:38, NASB)

© Leigh McLeroy 2004