He Will Wipe Away Every Tear

I like to tell a story of when I was a little boy and sometimes would get into scrapes. There was a boy in our town who was something of a bully. He just grew so much faster than everyone else, and he sort of towered over the rest of us, and he could be somewhat mean. And I remember one day I was playing with the kids and this bigger guy was a year older than I was. He started calling me bad names and making fun of me, and he hurt my feelings, and I started to cry and went home.

And I can remember this day. It was in the summertime and the back door was open, just the screen door was there. And I opened up the screen door and my mother was standing in the kitchen and she was cooking and she had an apron on. And as I was crying, she dropped her spoon or whatever she had, and she rushed over and she grabbed me and hugged me into her apron strings, as it were, and said, “What’s the matter?” And all these sobs, I could hardly get it out, that this fellow was treating me in a bad way. And she was very tender and calmed me down and she took the edge of her apron and she dried away my tears.

And I remember that because I’ve seen it repeated many, many, many times in the drama of life. I was visiting a friend in the hospital in Boston many years ago, who was dying, and he was in the final hours of his life. And I can remember being by his hospital bed and feeling utterly helpless because I couldn’t do anything to help him, except to take little pieces of ice and put them to his lips, which were parched. And as I was doing this on one occasion, he looked at me, he was too weak to even speak, and a single tear formed in his eye. And I took the little cloth that was on the bed stand and picked it up and wiped away that tear. How do you describe something like that? What is communicated from one human being to another when that kind of service is rendered, of the drying away of a tear?

Well, certainly as a child, when my mother physically dried my tears, I found great consolation and great comfort in that. My weeping stopped and I was restored to a sense of equilibrium. But guess what? I cried again and again and again. But when God personally comes to His people and dries their tears. It’s the end of all crying, at least crying from pain or from sorrow or from grief or from unhappiness, that there is a permanence in heaven of cessation of these things, because there will be no more death. There will be no more pain. There will be no more sorrow.