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Redemptive Tears

Isaiah 15:2b-3

On every head is baldness; every beard is shorn; in the streets they wear sackcloth; on the housetops and in the squares everyone wails and melts in tears.

As a thirty-five-year-old born and bred American, there are two things I’ve never yet witnessed that tend to go hand in hand: a great war and a great awakening. Compared to older generations who’ve lost comrades in the foxholes, my generation is too entitled, too thin-skinned, and too manicured by years of ease. We’ve got tattoos, but not scars; ideals, but not courage; logos, but not virtue. So we need a spiritual awakening. Whether it rises from the ashes of a world war or the embers of a Pentecost, we need an interruption to life that takes us by storm, that throws our ideologies against the wall, that forces us to face ourselves in the mirror, that moves us to wail over the evils in us, and that shows us in graphic fashion that “save yourself” was a lie from the beginning.

I’ve been praying for America to laugh again, friend—for a sweeping flood of heavenly light that dissipates the present darkness, but maybe that will only come when men remember how to weep.