“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in Your bottle. You have recorded each one in Your book” Psalm 56:8 NLT

You Have Collected all My Tears in Your Bottle …

Hello friend …🌻

If you have suffered deep pain from a tramatic experience or great loss in your life, no matter if it was recent or quite a while ago, please know that God desires to bind up your wounds and heal your broken heart. He cares deeply for us and a huge part of receiving His care during hard times is giving ourselves permission to grieve with Him.

Grieving can be tough as we confront deep losses and work through them with God. It’s messy, painful and difficult to look at our pain square in the face when everything within us would rather numb it, deny it or run away from it.

I’ve learned that what we refuse to deal with in life will eventually deal with us …

God is our safe place and He recorded the laments of some of His beloved people in the Bible as a loving example of the importance of grieving our pain and losses with Him.

My favorite examples are from the Psalmists David and Asaph …

They held nothing back when pouring their hearts out before the LORD but they also knew the importance of holding very tightly to their faith while lamenting to keep from sinking further into the blinding depths of pain.

Our spoken declarations of God’s faithfulness and trust-worthiness, despite our struggling feelings in the midst of deep distress, helps breathe faith into our hurting souls. But it also lets the enemy know that God is still very much in control of our lives despite the pain. This is important because Satan would love nothing more than to slither onto the scene and take advantage of our vulnerability to lead us down roads of bitterness that take us away from the God we love. 

I love this quote that I read last month while working on my book review:

“Emotional health comes by applying God’s Word to our circumstances. Emotional healing comes by relying on God’s Word to rename our circumstances.” – Doris Swift, Surrender the Joy Stealers

Holding onto and declaring God's love and truth over ourselves and our painful moments in life helps lead to our emotional healing. Share on X

Holding onto and declaring God’s love and truth over ourselves and our painful moments in life helps lead to our emotional healing. Whenever we read David’s lamenting, we hear his declarations of God’s love, protection and faithfulness to him. And God would shine His light and give David deep insight that he may never have gotten during the good times in his life. 

Comforting insight such as this one that David recorded here:

“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in Your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.” Psalm 56:8 

Psalm 56 was David’s plea for deliverance when the Philistines had seized him in Gath. I believe one of the many reasons God called David a man after His own heart was this: No matter the circumstances he found himself in, David made the Lord’s promises his truth despite his reality and this kept his heart soft and teachable towards God.

David let God be his safe place. He held nothing back, giving God full permission to access the deep and vulnerable parts of his heart. 

God has to get pretty close to us to collect our tears on His finger and save them in His bottle, wouldn’t you agree?

This verse is such a beautiful and loving description of our Lord’s tender and very personal care for David and for each one of us …

He is our Lord who sits with us, weeps with us and records all our sorrows in His book because He experienced them with us. That’s how much they mean to Him. He knows every little detail about us, remember when Jesus told us that the very hairs on our head are numbered?

Lamenting with God is emptying every pocket within our hearts of everything that He already knows is in there and letting Him lead us into healthier places with His truth and love. But if we don’t process pain in a healthy way, we can literally find ourselves stuck at the point of a traumatic event in our lives.

Have you ever heard someone refer to the behavior of a hurtful person as ‘behaving like a child?’ Sadly, it could very well be this person got stuck in a traumatic time in their childhood and they never received help to process it and move forward in a healthy way. 

When this happens, pain and rejection can become the filter through which we process life. If you have unprocessed pain, no matter how far back it goes, please trust the Lord to shine His light on it for you. He was there when the trauma happened and believe me, He remembers every last detail of it and knows how to walk you through to your healing.

Do you feel comfortable letting Him be strong for you during times of incredible distress?

Our God, who sustains the entire universe, is so tender and sensitive to our sorrow that He wanted us to know that He collects our tears in a bottle and records them in His book.

Does this sound like a distant, unfeeling God?

He whispers hope into our souls that “weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Ps 30:5 NLT).

When it feels like the darkness is closing in, by faith we know that whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty (Ps 91:1 NIV).

Did you catch that? God promises that we will rest …  in His Shadow.
The King James Bible says “under” the shadow of the Almighty.

As children of God, we live, move and breathe in His marvelous Light. So when the light seems to grow dim around us, we don’t need to fear evil because the shadow is being cast by God as He lovingly draws closer to us and tucks us under His wings. Here we are safe to pull off our mask and wrestle through our pain as His Holy Spirit ministers to us. This is our ‘Secret Place’ where the enemy cannot find us.

I pray God can use these words to bring comfort to someone today …

Hugs and Prayers …

Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him. Ps 34:8

You Have Collected all My Tears in Your Bottle – Psalm 56:8 @freshgracefortoday.com

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