We Sing Through Tears

Track eleven is the song a country church sings together at a graveside. We Sing Through Tears is a tender, minor-key hymn, and it does the hardest thing the album asks of itself - it holds weeping and praise in the same breath, and lets neither one cancel the other.

It will not pretend grief away. There is an empty place at the table now, a quiet where a voice would be. We are not going to say it does not hurt - it hurts, and the Lord can see. And it will not postpone the song until the grief is finished, either. We will not wait for the grief to dry. Verse three draws the careful line - we do not grieve the way the hopeless grieve, we know there is a shore. But hope has never told us not to weep. It tells us what the weeping's for. Hope does not cancel tears. It gives them a direction.

The bridge rests the whole thing on the shortest verse in the Bible. Jesus wept. He stood and cried at a grave He was walking to - a grave He was about to open, weeping beside it anyway. He knew that He would raise the dead, He wept beside it still. That is the permission the whole song needed. If the Lord could weep in hope, then grief and faith were never enemies. So if the Lord could weep in hope, then so, in hope, we will. The song and the weeping both rise to His ears at once.