Danny ChaiI just bought Michael W. Smith (Albert Pujols’ favorite musician, according to his web site)’s Worship Again. It’s incredibly cheesy. Despite that (or maybe because of it), I find myself being deeply moved by it in parts. I nearly cried during Lord Have Mercy. Issues.
I think maybe the reason I cry so much nowadays at stuff like this and Spider-Man 2 is to make up for the like 15 years where I didn’t cry at all. I honestly thought I had defective tear glands. Actually, for that brief period when I wore contacts, when I was getting examined the doctor said my eyes are particularly dry so they recommended against hard lenses. To me, that verified what I already knew – I was physically unable to cry.
My youth group wasn’t super charismatic but during retreats we’d always have sprinklings of tongues during intense prayer sessions. I remember one such session our youth pastor going around and telling us all to pray louder. That’s kind of what it was like. Anyway, sometimes I would pray that I would cry. Odd right? But people were crying all around me, and I equated crying kind of like tongues; where tongues is a demonstration of being touched by the Spirit, crying was like a symbol of sincere emotion. Places in Scripture say to pray for tongues; I applied that to tears.
Never happened though, never cried. I used to say I was crying on the inside, but I’m not sure that’s true. I just didn’t cry, and felt kinda guilty about that, like I was less sincere than people around me, or like I didn’t fully appreciate Jesus as much as everyone else did or something. I’m still not sure why I never cried, but I just didn’t. I was just heartless I guess.
Anyway, another thing I like about the Spider-Man movies is that Peter Parker is motivated primarily by guilt. That’s like the story of my life.