If you ask anyone who knows me—family, friends, people who sit near me at church—they’ll tell you that I am a big cry baby. Well, hopefully they won’t phrase it like that, but it’s a pretty accurate description. I cry while watching movies, commercials, and news segments about football teams who let that one kid score the winning touchdown even though he’s just a really skinny water boy but he’s the most devoted and encouraging person on the team and they eventually realize his true worth. I cry in every wedding, funeral, and baptism. I cry in big crowds, in small groups, and all by myself.   I’ve always been embarrassed by my tears. I don’t really like to draw attention to myself, and when I cry it gets people rubbernecking in my direction, no doubt trying to figure out what tragedy I’m currently suffering through. But most of the time, I’m doing fine. I’m just designed to wear my feelings outside my body and they come out in liquid form. My grown-up brain knows that it’s perfectly okay for me to cry, but I still don’t like it.   Then I stumbled upon a little verse in Psalm 56 where David says to God, “You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.” All of a sudden, my tears took on a significance. Each one is worth preserving. They are valuable enough to be caught in a bottle and logged in a record book.   When I recently watched my youngest son worshipping with his youth group, hands raised and eyes closed as he sang praises, I wept. Then a visual came into my mind of God standing beside me as He held a slender glass bottle against my cheek, catching the tears as they rolled down, and I realized this was my contribution. I was worshipping with my tears.   When I cry because I see someone else cry, this is an act of both service and worship. This is me trying to obey the principle of mourning with others as they mourn. When I sit in a church pew and cry—whether it’s a funeral or a wedding or just another Sunday morning—I’m attempting to do what Jesus said in Matthew 22. When He was asked which commandment was the most important, Jesus quoted Deuteronomy: “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.” For me, my all comes out as tears.   Of course, not everyone has to express their emotions like I do, but that doesn’t make my show of feelings wrong or weird. At least that’s what I’m trying to remind myself. We have so many examples in Scripture of strong people who were brought to their knees as they wept—David, Jeremiah, Hannah. And don’t forget that Jesus wept multiple times—for his friend, for Jerusalem, for his own death. These stories tell me that all of our emotions are safe in God’s presence. Just like our expressions of joy are welcome, our tears aren’t radioactive drops of embarrassment. As James 4 says it, “Come near to God, and God will come near to you.”