Broken Senses

Have you ever been afraid to change your perspective? For me, it goes like this:

If I’m grateful in this situation, God will forget how miserable it actually is, and He’ll leave me in it. God will forget my tears if I rejoice. God will overlook my sorrow if I thank Him. God will shrug off my fears if I’m grateful. God will ignore my pain if I praise Him.  Things will be broken forever.

The Apostle John would have a few words with me for this kind of thinking, and so would the prophet Isaiah (see what they're inspired to say in Revelation 21:4 and Isaiah 25:8). In these descriptions of the end of time, when God and His people reunite, one of God’s first acts is a personal one. From individual faces, He wipes away tears. Each set of eyes that welled up, that spilled over, that ran mascara, and hid from public view, He dries. 

As He waits to do that for you, you’re operating under the old order, the “former things” that I would describe as the five broken senses from Revelation 21:4: tears, death, mourning, crying, and pain. Through these, we may discover earth’s realities, but by recognizing them as temporarily out of order, we discover reasons to be grateful. 

To see how I personally experience the world through these five broken senses, I listed my current difficulties and future fears that dominate my outlook on life. I filled a sheet of paper. Then I looked for similarities in the list, and I found that each could be categorically grouped under one of these broken senses: tears, death, mourning, crying or pain.  For example, my fear of losing a family member could be categorized most clearly under death.  

Tears and death are straightforward categories of our experiences, but what distinguishes mourning, crying, and pain from each other?  

Mourning is also translated as sorrow in some versions. We mourn lost time, a shortened life, ruined expectations, broken relationships, etc. Things end in ways we wish they didn’t. 

Crying, according to Vine’s Expository Dictionary, is an onomatopoeia that sounds like a raven’s cry in Greek, and, according to Strong’s Concordance, it’s an outcry of “notification, tumult, or grief”.  Think of this word like an emergency vehicle’s siren: it notifies of an emergency, involves some kind of tumult, and represents possible grief.  It’s a reason for alarm and creates sudden upheaval. We’d like to pull to the side of the road and let those scenarios pass right by us. 

Pain can signify more than just general pain, and includes “laborious toil”, according to Vine’s Expository Dictionary. From failing health to taxing work, the pain is real, and we can’t medicate enough to avoid it.

Would you consider making a list of your own current struggles or future fears that inform your perspective? See how they fit within the five broken senses of the old system, and turn your list into a reason for gratitude that God will one day fix what is temporarily out of order.  What you might find is that gratitude begins His restoration right here and now.

“He will wipe away every tear from YOUR eyes. 

There will be no more death,

Or mourning,

Or crying,

Or pain,

For the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4