When you are afraid of being weak, you learn not to cry. That was me for most of my youth and adult life. I got angry a lot, but I never cried. At many times,  I felt lost, lonely, depressed, bitterly unhappy, but I have no memory of ever crying, except once. I was standing at the bedside of my father, who was in a coma just before he died. I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop. I was bawling; people were staring at me, and I could not control it. It was like a dam that had broken, and the water just flowed on. That was the only time that my sadness burst from me in tears.  I never cried for joy either, and while good things did happen, I never felt the kind of overwhelming joy that can lead to emotional crying.

All of that changed starting from the day that I sat alone in my car having just declared out loud that I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord. Again, the floodgates opened, and this time it was joy that filled me and poured out of my eyes. Since then, I have become a person who cries often and easily. Perhaps its just a sign of growing old, but I think it’s more than that. I cry at beauty – mostly in music, but also at poetry or beautifully written prose. Stories of heroism, of human goodness and triumph over hardship and trouble bring me to tears.

Even my own writing sometimes chokes me up. I have appeared in videos and podcasts about my testimony on coming to faith, and a few times I had to stop, close my eyes and clear my throat. There are passages in my books that I cannot read aloud. And there are passages in many other books that leave me sobbing.  

It can be annoying, and I often feel like apologizing when it happens. I think back to my early teen years when such behavior would have earned me being called names or worse by my peers. And other times in my long, and not particularly peaceful life, the worst thing I could have done would have been to break down in tears.

But I have no urge anymore to find a way to stop crying so easily. I know (I am a biologist after all) that tears contain traces of hormones, neurotransmitters and signal transducers of various kinds, and that crying does have a physiological benefit on one’s mood. The relief that comes after having a good cry is not an illusion, but a biochemical response, at least partially.

For me, especially when it happens in church, while singing a hymn with deep meaning for me, or hearing a beautiful sermon, it’s often an expression of joy at the miracle of my conversion to faith. If I could dance, I would. If I could sing, I would. If I could jump and shout, and run around like a happy dog, I would. I cannot do those things, but I can cry, and I can only hope and trust that my God sees and understands that my tears are my words of thanks and praise. And that everyone else can understand that my words are those tears transformed into a more acceptable and communicative form of expression of the joy in my soul at being one with my God.