Wept

“and you have torn your clothes and wept before me” 2 Kings 22:19

Wept – I watched him weep.  He knew that I watched.  It didn’t matter anymore.  The tears of sorrow would not stop.  Weeping for his lost children, victims of a failed father.  Weeping for a brother who no longer called.  A parent gone.  A friend far away.  Lives broken.  Damage done.  Weeping because his life was swirling faster than the slower pace of loving those who meant so much.  Weeping for a daughter who desperately needed him before she learned despair.

He wasn’t an old man.  My age.  His face looked much like mine.  The eyes looked back at me.  I knew them.  Familiar.  Someone I had seen many times before.

He thought about this verse.  And wept before his God.  A world where heartache knew no bounds.  Where the price of love was paid with blood.

I realized I knew this man.  And he knew me.  We shared the same space, the same place.  Together we knelt by the bedside.  Together we cried.

“Father, I can’t go on without You.”

Eventually he left the room.  So did I.  We went together, one on each side of the mirror.

There are times when God allows us to see ourselves in the mirror of torn relationship.  There are times when God un-educates us from our spinning selves.  Times when we see our own Jerusalem, gripped in the mythology of me.  Those are times of bakah, of weeping.  The way of the cross is showered with tears.