Jesus Wept. God Still Weeps With Us.

"Jesus wept".

Around my childhood family dinner table, my sister and I were required to recite a Bible verse as part of the food blessing ritual. I often recited "Jesus wept ", one of the shortest verses in the Bible.

I recited this verse hundreds of times without giving a thought to the powerful image of God shedding tears over the death of a loved one: Lazarus.

Read the account in the eleventh chapter of the gospel of John in the New Testament.

In our time, there are many reasons for God to weep with us and over us: mass shootings in the mainland United States, forgotten American citizens in Puerto Rico, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar,  refugees suffering on almost every continent, war, racism, hunger...on and on it goes.

We cry because we don't know why these things keep happening and we don't know how to stop them.

God cries because He does know.

In the humanity-wide curse called sin, we have fallen far and furiously from the intent of our design and creation.

We refuse to reach back to our creator. We don't trust Him, we're not sure He's there, we're not sure He loves us or even wants to know us, and we want to rely exclusively on the visible and the humanly measureable.

These ways of thinking and acting have brought us to our current dead-end state.

Yes, there are moments of joy and happiness. Sadly, these moments can be minimized or washed away by the next unexpected crisis or disaster.

We're wondering why God doesn't "do something" to fix the messiness of our world.

God reaches out to us, asking us to trust Him to show us how to think, how to live, how to dream.

We don't reach back.

How often have we heard someone say "I won't trust a God who allows so much evil"?

How deeply and sincerely has God reached out to every soul, offering rest, forgiveness, and peace to each individual who honestly reaches back?

We don't reach back.

This is our dilemma. And the weeping continues.