I Need to Cry Today

Way, way down deep in the human heart, a faint voice begins to breathe, stronger and stronger. It is a voice of need, a voice of desperation.

And as this voice reaches the surface of our consciousness, it seems to say, “I need to cry. I need to fall down and lament the loss of love in the earth. I want my tears to flow, a river of saline that washes my heart of its stubbornness and fear and callousness.

“I need to cry hard, so hard that my tears become a torrent gushing through the cracks in the stony wall inside, a wall that has protected me from being human, a wall that separates me from pain and suffering and from the pangs of sorrow endured by those on life’s front line.

“I need to weep, uncontrollably and unabashedly, like a little child. I need to feel the pain of a hundred wars and a thousand famines and a million gaunt faces crying for bread, crying for peace, crying for mercy and love.

“I need to cry. I need to break up the depths, to fearlessly go down, down, down there where the brokenhearted dwell, where we will find them sitting there at the feet of the…King.

“For that is where we will find Him. That is where He dwells—in the land of broken hearts.  That’s where Love is. For Love is conceived in a pool of tears. And mercy flows on a broken-up  river bed.”

The King knows that we can do it, that we can be as a little child again, that we can feel again—not just the joys of life, but more importantly, the sorrows. That we can feel the agony of the freshly made orphan, who sits wounded and alone in a desert minefield, or the pain of a mother falling to the ground in grief over her daughter’s decimated body.

He knows that we can feel again, that we can crumble down the wall and let His love out in crashing sobs that seem to say, “I need to cry today.”

Kenneth Wayne Hancock