Sea Glass (The bottle of tears)

"You keep track of my sorrows.  You have collected my tears in your bottle.  You have recorded each one in your book."

Psalm 56:8

(I weep for my children.  Every day I weep and cry and pray.)
(click HERE to read what I wrote on September 11, 2014 which will explain this a little more.)

My tears pour out like liquid crystals, and I know that God is catching them.  He saves them in His bottle, the one which has my name on it.  I wonder why God collects tears?  God collects tears like I collect sea glass.  

     When my life broke apart and shattered 4 years ago, I used to spend a lot of time near the Ocean.  There is one beach in particular that was not as popular and touristy and others; it was a little farther south, it was a little more wild, and I could park just outside of the fence and I could walk for hours.  I would collect sea glass and pray.  

     Winter is actually the best time to collect sea glass.  

     I would find a piece of softened glass, broken and shattered off of what it had originally been, and I would put it in my pocket.  Sometimes I would find one that was still jagged on the edges, still  clear in color, and I would throw it back in the ocean. 

 It wasn't done becoming yet.

    At the end of the day, I would dump my pockets out and see what I had collected.  A display of white, green, blue, turquoise, and brownish gold glass pieces, all of which had at one point been something and then been reduced to only a tiny fraction of what they at one time had been.  But the ocean and it's tossing and turning had gotten a hold of these shards of glass and through the tumbling of the haphazard and often dangerous waves, each piece of broken glass had been softened and smoothed, and eventually deposited back on the shore where someone like me would recognize it at a jewel, and collect it to put into my own little jar with all of the other pieces of sea glass.  By the time I have picked it up and put it into my bottle, it was nothing of what it had once been.  If you were to find the original jar or ornament or whatever it had once been a part of, you would not be able to piece it back into the whole; it would no longer fit.  

     All of the pieces of sea glass together are like silent tears bearing witness to each it's own devastation; who knows how many devastations my one bottle of glass pieces can hold. 

     And so I wonder sometimes if the tears the Lord stores in jars are actually treasures to Jesus. And He actually knows the broken story behind each one.  He can pick up each individual crystallized tear and say, 

"Do you remember what happened here, my child?  Even if you have forgotten this part your story, I have not; I will remind you." 

     He knows.

But God, don't you have enough tears already, and isn't the jar full enough to be a thing of beauty in Heaven, when your light and glory shine through the jar? Is it somehow reflected down upon the remnants of this human life on Earth?  

     I miss my babies, oh HOW I miss my babies.
It's not just the missing of time with them and the mothering of them, it's all the things that I have missed along the way, and am currently missing.

I cry just saying that.
 I don't have the answers, but I cry daily, and God himself is holding my broken, and collecting my tears, and I look at my own little jar of glass once sharply dangerous and now softly smooth,  and I remember.

Admittedly, I cannot remember every time I cry.

But what I do remember is this:

     I remember that He died and He suffered,
his body broken like cheap glass to be stepped on and tossed away,

But He broke Himself completely 

Came down to Earth's shore

and became the very treasure 

that would heal my own.

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.  He who was seated on the throne said, 'I am making everything new!'  The He said, 'Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true."

Revelation 21:4-5