Did you know that according to Psalms 56:8, God puts our tears in a bottle and in a book? And the details of your tears many times reveals a “roadmap” of what is happening in your life at that point! (Notice the photo.)
It’s quite remarkable, but a woman who has done years of microscope enhanced photography has discovered some amazing things about our tears that we would have probably never known about or even thought seriously about…
Rose-Lynn Fisher, as part of a new project called “Topography of Tears,” used microscopes to give us an unexpected view of another familiar subject: DRIED HUMAN TEARS. She had previously released some incredible photos from an earlier project she did on bees and then began to work on a bone fragment of her own hip bone removed during surgery. It was at this point that she came to the realization that “everything we see in our lives is JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG, VISUALLY,” she explains. “So I had this moment where I suddenly thought, ‘I wonder what a tear looks like up close?’”
When she caught one of her own tears on a slide, dried it, and then peered at it through a standard light microscope, “It was really interesting. It looked like an aerial view, almost as if I was looking down at a landscape from a plane,” she says. “Eventually, I started wondering—would a tear of grief look any different than a tear of joy? And how would they compare to, say, an onion tear?”
This curiosity ended up launching a multi-year photography project in which Fisher collected, examined and photographed more than 100 tears from both herself and a handful of other volunteers, including a newborn baby.
Scientifically, tears are divided into three different types, based on their origin. Both tears of grief and joy are EMOTIONAL TEARS, triggered by extreme emotions, whether positive or negative.
Then there are BASAL TEARS, which are released continuously in tiny quantities (on average, 0.75 to 1.1 grams over a 24-hour period) to keep the cornea lubricated.
And finally, REFLEX TEARS are secreted in response to an irritant, like dust, onion vapors or tear gas.
All tears contain a variety of biological substances (including oils, antibodies and enzymes) suspended in salt water, but as Fisher saw, tears from each of the different categories include distinct molecules as well. Emotional tears, for instance, have been found to contain protein-based hormones including the neurotransmitter leucine enkephalin, a natural painkiller that is released when the body is under stress. WOW!
Additionally, because the structures seen under the microscope are largely crystallized salt, the circumstances under which the tear dries can lead to radically dissimilar shapes and formations, so two emotional tears with the exact same chemical makeup can look very different up close. “There are so many variables—there’s the chemistry, the viscosity, the setting, the evaporation rate and the settings of the microscope,” Fisher says.
As Fisher pored over the hundreds of dried tears, she began to see even more ways in which they resembled LARGE-SCALE LANDSCAPES, or as she calls them, “aerial views of emotion terrain.”
“IT’S AMAZING TO ME HOW THE PATTERNS OF NATURE SEEM SO SIMILAR, REGARDLESS OF SCALE,” she says. “YOU CAN LOOK AT PATTERNS OF EROSION THAT ARE ETCHED INTO EARTH OVER THOUSANDS OF YEARS, AND SOMEHOW THEY LOOK VERY SIMILAR TO THE BRANCHED CRYSTALLINE PATTERNS OF A DRIED TEAR THAT TOOK LESS THAN A MOMENT TO FORM.”
Reading that statement made me think of how the Bible teaches that the whole creation is GROANING for redemption! (See Romans 8:22) It’s as if the very same patterns of our tears form the very patterns engraved into the earth.
Closely studying tears for so long has made Fisher think of them as far more than a salty liquid we discharge during difficult moments. “Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger and as complex as a rite of passage,” she says. “It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.”
The details of such things always blows my mind! And we rarely take note of them. How incredible our gracious Creator God is and the undeniable patterns found in His creation! And to think that the shortest verse in the Bible makes a powerful statement about our Lord and His very own tears…
John 11:35
“Jesus wept.”
NEVER THINK FOR A MOMENT THAT HE DOESN’T TAKE NOTICE OF YOUR TEARS – REGARDLESS IF THEY ARE A SIGNAL OF SADNESS OR JOY! Every hair on your head is numbered, Jesus said, so don’t minimize the great detail that our All-Knowing God knows about YOU and what you are going through right now!
THINK ABOUT IT! – John Muncy