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Does God Cry at Funerals?

Finding a God Who Meets Us in Our Sorrow

Dan Foster
Backyard Church

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Image by Anemone123 from Pixabay

The first time I saw people weeping in a church worship service, I didn’t know what to do with it.

I wasn’t raised in a particularly emotional church tradition, and the idea of expressing raw grief — or joy — in public felt foreign to me. As the music swelled and hands reached toward the ceiling, I noticed a woman near the front, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed. She wasn’t just wiping away a polite tear; she was weeping openly, as though she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders.

I sat frozen in my pew, unsure of how to respond. Part of me felt uncomfortable, like I was intruding on a private moment, while another part felt secondhand embarrassment. In my upbringing, emotions like this were meant to be private, not spilled out for the entire congregation to witness. Was I supposed to feel this too? Was I missing something?

And yet, beneath the discomfort, I also felt a strange pull. Part of me envied her. She was bringing something so vulnerable, so honest, into a space I had always treated as formal and composed. Where I would have kept my emotions locked up tight, she seemed free, as though she had no choice but to let it all out.

Even when I attended my grandfather’s funeral as a nine-year-old boy, I didn’t cry. I…

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