2007 High School Spring Retreat!! A three-day whirlwind of Speed Uno, Puppy Chow, Wet Suits, Waterballoons, German Attack-dog Trainers and a couple of Texans sweetly and strongly bringin' the Word...

Tears on Tape

Last night was Anna’s end of the year pre-school program. The teachers led the kids from each age group up on stage where they stood to sing the songs they had learned in chapel throughout the year. When the three-year-old class started making their way up the stairs, I pressed the red button on our video camera and disappeared behind the LCD display. I caught a glimpse of Anna’s face at the end of a row of pews but couldn’t see it very well on the little screen I was looking at. In my left ear I heard Christy say, “Uh oh…” and then I saw what she saw… Anna’s little face was crumbling and the tears were about to start flowing.

The next thing I knew, most of the three-year-olds were on stage and one of the helpers was holding Anna while her quaking voice rang out over the whole sanctuary… “I want my mommy!” Christy was out of the pew in a flash and up on the stairs of the stage sitting right under Anna as her class started to sing their songs. I zoomed in on those tear-stained cheeks as she looked down at Christy and said, “I’m just sad.” As the other kids mumbled their way through “The Butterfly Song” I watched crocodile tears run down Anna’s face as she looked at Christy and said, “I want my daddy!”

Christy sat with her and she calmed down… in fact, she even started to smile and by the time they got to the third and final song, “God is so good” Anna was pretty much laughing… Christy eased back away from the stage, Anna caught sight of her Granny and her Nan and started to smile in earnest… she even started to sing a little. But as the second verse rolled around, the tears came back…

All year long Anna’s teachers have told us about how she is their little singer… about how she loves chapel and always sings out above the crowd. This has been our experience at home as well. The child loves to sing, and she loves to sing loud. But when you go to pre-school music programs, you don’t really hear the kids singing… you hear them mumble or watch them tap their feet and blow kisses at the cameras while their teachers sing the songs… Last night the low murmur of pre-school singing was broken by Anna’s sobbing voice belting out through the tears, “He loves me so… He loves me so, He’s so good to me!”

It was one of the saddest and yet sweetest things I have ever seen, watching my little girl crying and singing about His love for her through a viewfinder… Psalm 56:8 says, “You have taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle, are they not in Your book?” (NASB)

After the program, I took Anna out for a chocolate ice cream cone and after we put her in bed, Christy and I sat on the couch and watched the tape again. It was sweet, sad and really cute… I mean, she stole the show. As we watched it back, our hearts broke in love for her. I was thinking about what David said in Psalm 56 when he was in the hands of the Philistines in Gath and how he cried out for God, trusting His love, but crying still and how he took comfort in the fact that God not only knows when we hurt, but He writes it all down. He puts our tears in a bottle… like a time capsule… like a video tape. Years from now we’ll be able to show that tape to Anna and she’ll see how in the moment when she was crying out for Mommy, there was a flash in front of the screen and seconds later, Mommy was there. In the same way, our Lord has recorded all our tears and all our cries to Him. Someday, He’ll show us the tape, and then we’ll see Him rushing to our side when the tears come. We’ll watch strength and laughter return to our faces and see ourselves start to sing (if even through more tears) “He loves me so, He’s so good to me.”