The Room Where Crying Stops

Margaret Chen had worked the night shift in the neonatal ICU for twenty-three years, but the night three-year-old Elias died from leukemia was the night she finally sat in the parking garage and asked God if any of it mattered.

She had held his mother's hand. She had watched the monitors go flat. She had stripped the bed with practiced efficiency and then pressed her back against the cold cinder block wall of the stairwell and wept until her chest ached.

"Why does it keep not getting fixed?" she said to no one.

John, exiled on Patmos, asked something like the same question — sitting not in a parking garage but on volcanic rock, watching the empire swallow everything he loved. And into that exile, God gave him a vision so specific it sounds like architecture: a new heaven, a new earth, a city descending like a bride dressed for the person she loves most.

And then this detail that stops everything: God Himself will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Not an angel. Not a cosmic policy change. The Almighty — personally, tenderly — reaches across every grief ever wept in stairwells and parking garages and hospital rooms, and does what only the most intimate love does. He dries the face of the ones He made.

Death abolished. Mourning ended. The old order, which Margaret knows too well, passing away like a tide that finally, finally goes out — and does not return.

That is the promise of Revelation 21.