For crying in the sink!

My late father never used foul language, but he did have a few expressions of frustrations. One was “Horse feathers!” and the other was “For crying in the sink!”

Well, Dad, the other day I was crying in the sink. Copious tears. And I hadn’t broken a dish or cooked a wretched dinner.
My husband had just sold a bike he fixed up, and in the door along with payment came two large onions. A tip from the buyer? Sometimes, I just don’t ask. Because I don’t use onions much in cooking, I chop them up and freeze them in egg-size portions to use as needed.

As so, weep, bawl, buckets of face-dribblers, I was rendering those big white tear-jerkers to freezable portions.

If you really care to know, we cry when chopping onions because they produce the chemical irritant known as syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which stimulates the eyes' lachrymal glands so they release tears.( For you avid chemists, learn more at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/onion.html.)

I’d been thinking about crying lately, anyway, as I mull over writing something on the blessing of tears. Revelation 21:4 has lodged in my heart in recent weeks: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes.” The scene is Heaven. No more death, mourning, crying or pain, “for the old order of things has passed away.”

My prayer notebook has a few tear splotches on it. I’m going to more funerals where tears leak unashamedly. Some early mornings when I rise to hear the birds and listen to God, tears come. I think of the perfect place, the “abode” (the accurate meaning of the Greek mone in John 14:6, not “mansions”) that God is planning.

I dug a little deeper into the verse and looked up the Greek word we translate as "wipe away," exaleipho. It comes from two words, "out" and "to anoint," and means "to wipe out or away." This is the picture it provides me: Yahweh, the Sovereign of all time and place, comes to me. With the fingers that created a universe, He cups my face and thumbs away the earth-stains of tears. He whispers, “No more tears. Come to My joy and peace.” Every tear, gone.

And once the vision blurred by pained tears is cleared, I will stand amazed at what I never knew.

In the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, there’s a conversation that always made me think of arriving in Heaven. Lewis had the talking unicorn in The Last Battle declare, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”

For crying in the sink? Not at all. For crying for joy? Maybe.

And here’s my trivia question: Will there be onions in Heaven?