Does God Cry? Suffering, Faith and Human Compassion

I've watched a child learn to flinch before they ever learned to read.

Watched a mother count her change and choose which little mouth she'd feed.

Watched a father lose his livelihood, then lose himself to shame, while a thousand people passed him without ever knowing his name.

I've seen hospital halls at midnight where the bravest voices break, where forever becomes never in a breath you cannot save.

Where a bedroom stays untouched because to move a single chair means admitting who you're waiting for is never walking there.

And I've wondered how a God called love can watch what love survives.

How the innocent inherit wounds that haunt them all their lives.

If you hear the unheard hurt, if you see behind our eyes, don't explain to me why suffering exists.

Tell me, God, do you cry?

Does God cry when the sirens split the silence of the night?

Does God cry when another frightened child can't close their eyes?

When the hungry watch us wasting. When the lonely smile while breaking.

When we're praying for salvation while ignoring someone's cries.

Does God ache when we turn another difference into hate?

Does God break when forgiveness comes one heartbeat too late?

If Your presence lives within us, if Your essence never dies, then perhaps every tear that ever fell from our eyes was also God who cried.

We perfected mass production, reconstruction, mass destruction, turned compassion into captions, monetized our own corruption.

Turned our neighbors into numbers, turned attention into trade, then wrote scriptures about mercy while inventing whom to hate.

We can photograph a famine from a satellite in flight.

Watch a city disappear and change the channel for the night.

Map the edges of creation, split the atom, sequence life, yet haven't learned to see ourselves behind another person's eyes.

Every century says never. Every century once again.

Different borders, different banners, same old graves, living like slaves.

And we keep begging You for miracles while the miracles pass us by.

Perhaps heaven isn't silent. Perhaps heaven's asking why.

Does God cry when the innocent are punished for our pride?

Does God cry when somebody begs for mercy and is denied?

When the powerless are broken, when the hatred goes unspoken, when another heart is closing because nobody looked inside.

Does God ache when we make another enemy from fear?

Does God break when somebody disappears unheard, unseen, unfelt, unfeared?

If Your presence lives within us, then perhaps we've been asking why God permits the world to suffer while God suffers through our eyes.

Still a stranger runs through fire for a person they don't know.

Still a trembling hand holds tighter when it's almost time to go.

Still somebody shares their dinner though there's barely food for two.

Still somebody betrayed completely won't become what hatred grew.

Still the wounded comfort wounded. Still the grieving somehow give.

Still a person crushed by cruelty chooses tenderness and lives.

And that's the mystery that breaks me more than evil ever could.

How can hearts that know such darkness still remember how to be good?

How can someone torn to pieces, scarred by everything they've seen, still find love enough within them to become what love should mean?

Maybe God cries through the mother holding someone through the night.

Maybe God cries through the stranger saying, "You'll be all right."

Maybe God lives in the mercy that survives in the people given every reason to grow cruel who still choose to be kind.

Maybe God aches every time we teach another heart to hate.

Maybe God breaks every time our love arrives too late.

And when humanity looks upward asking why You never came, perhaps You've answered us for centuries through every suffering face.

We touched planets, mapped the heavens, made machines that learned our speech.

Still we let another human starve within our reach.

What is all our information if our wisdom never starts?

What good is searching all creation while ignoring where You are?

Maybe not beyond the heavens.

Maybe not beyond the blue.

Maybe every time we ask, "God, where are you?"

Somewhere in another broken person comes the question back anew.

I'm here.

Where are you?

Then become the answer you once begged Him to send you.

Be the hands that hold the hurting. Be the voice that carries through.

Because somebody tonight is asking God that question too.

And perhaps they'll find Him in the love that came through you.