Friday saw me clutching a box of tissues as my Mum and I went into a room to celebrate my late brother’s life. He called it a ‘Cheerful Farewell’ which he had organised and planned. He had made a professional video of himself talking and sharing his favourite musical highlights and so he had the final word. I couldn’t stop the tears and the weeping has continued. One only has to mention that Friday and I start again!

I’m aware that the Bible has many words of comfort regarding how we feel especially when life seems harrowing and upsetting. “Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5) comes to mind. It’s wonderful to think that our Creator God gave us the facility to cry to release the tensions within us and keep us hopefully healthy especially emotionally in doing so. The British upper lip attitude doesn’t hold water here!

It’s good that children can cry or else we wouldn’t know that something might be wrong, especially babies and toddlers who can hardly express themselves in any other way. How we as adults need that empathy to feel with them when they hurt physically or in any other way. Again our Creator God has given most of us the ability to feel pain so that we are alerted to something wrong.

May the words of our mouths and the actions we do be loving and kind to those going through the weeping seasons of their lives. It’s so easy to ignore someone who is upset when an arm round, a hug or a kind word can make all the difference.

In the Bible it says that God holds our tears in a bottle! David (before he became the King of Israel) said, “You number my wanderings; put my tears into Your bottle; are they not in Your book.” (Psalm 56:8) As a younger Christian, I received a lot of comfort from the words ‘He knows’ as my heart would often break with circumstances in my life but God has proved Himself faithful in picking me up and carrying me – like in the poem about the footprints in the sand – only one set of prints could be seen at times and that was because the Father was holding the child in His big arms!

May God’s love reach our children so that they can realise how much they are loved and know for themselves the nearness of God in practical and definite ways. That’s one of the reasons why Diamond Books came into being!