Diary of a Joyful Person: When I Wanna Cry but Can’t

Break my heart for what breaks yours.

This is my prayer to God for this month and what I believe God is wanting me to focus on at this point.

One of the strongest gifts God has given me is that of joy. I am inspired- I can see beauty and God’s hand in most things and that fills me with life. God paints my mind with His light and His joy and vividly colors my imagination. I don’t let things get me down very easily.

This is definitely a gift in that I can bring that light and joy of God to others, yet it can also be a curse. Sometimes I feel like Cameron Diaz from the movie The Holiday where she can’t cry. She just can’t get herself to cry even when its a time where she should/ it would be natural to.

I find that I can cry at a sad part in a movie, or when I read the moving ending of my favorite book Les Miserables. Sometimes on rare
emotional occasions, I’ll get a really sweet message from a family member/dear friend that moves me to tears. But when it comes to things that are truly sad I feel I have a hard time letting myself be sad.

There’s a lot going on in this world that is extremely heartbreaking. Things that continuously break God’s heart. Jesus was often grieved over the sin and the sorrows of this world. An example was when he wept when Lazarus died: “when Jesus saw her (Mary) weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved…Jesus began to weep” – John 11:33.

Within the countries I’ve been to so far, I’ve seen extreme poverty, people living under tents, babies with their bellies protruding out of starvation, beggars on the streets, people with extreme disabilities, stories of orphans being left on the streets alone, thousands of babies dying from disease/poor delivery care in hospitals, and
more. These eat at me and I feel passionate about creating change and fixing these problems, yet I don’t know that I ever truly sit in them and let them rip my heart in two as it does for God seeing His precious children in these states.

And then there is sin. It breaks God’s heart every single time we sin against Him and it is this sin we are born into that creates these problems in the world. I think too often I don’t feel the weight of my own sin. It wasn’t until this last month where God began revealing so much of my ugliness and brought me face to face with my sins in a way that made me feel helpless and desperate for His strength and forgiveness. This is what helped me to focus on the cross and to feel the great need for the payment Jesus made for me out of love- that it is impossible for me to do anything on my own strength. It brought me to my knees in a place of humility.

And that’s where I found myself truly sorrowful
over my sin and that of others. And that’s where God showed me that He wants me to grieve as He does for the rest of the world in the ways that sin has taken root and caused distruction.

I want to feel what God feels, to see what He sees. I pray that He breaks down my walls and lets the floodgates loose so I may feel the sorrow He feels for His children He loves so deeply and perfectly. That’s when God’s unfathomable love for us becomes so much clearer, and the gift of having the hope that is in Christ so much more precious.

For those living in desperation, those wondering when their next meal will be or where they will lay their head, those who feel unloved/uncared for/unworthy, those without a father or mother, those in critical health, our brothers and sisters being persecuted while standing up for their faith, those trapped in addictions, those facing abuse, those who have lost a loved one, those trapped in slavery, those
facing constant injustice.

Lord, please break my heart for what breaks yours.