It Seems We're Fearfully Made and Designed

My eyes water a lot. Aside from the fact that I'm fairly emotional and cry easily, my eyes water when no emotion is involved whatsoever.

It's getting colder outside, and I can almost guarantee that if you see me on campus, I'll have big, fat, crybaby tears rolling down my cheeks, even though I'm not sad at all. I know lots of people's eyes water when it's cold and windy, but this is insane. Mostly it just annoys me. It wears off all my make up (I worry too much about my makeup, apparently), people are probably going to start thinking I'm some weird emo kid who cries all the time, and it's just a nuisance.

But I never really considered why we humans are wired to react this way. I mean, crying really doesn't serve any purpose except to wash debris out of the eye. Crying when you're sad or angry doesn't do anything. And if you're cold, that doesn't mean there's something in your eye.

I realized the other night though that tears are salty (duh, we all know that, and have since we were small). But what do we do when the sidewalks freeze over? We sprinkle salt on them. Why isn't the ocean frozen? Because it's full of salt water. So my overactive tear ducts are really just trying to keep my eyeballs from freezing. Which I think is, in a dorky, nerdy kind of way, really pretty awesome.

A lot of people say that God and science don't go together, but I don't think that's right. I think science is us figuring out how God makes stuff happen. Like maybe God set up a machine that does the repetitive stuff so that he can go through and manually do the fun stuff. And some of that machine stuff is science. And I think it's awesome when I realize stuff like, "Our tears are salty so our eyeballs don't freeze." I know if I were designing something, I wouldn't have thought of that.

Maybe that'll help me not hate it so much when the cold and the wind make me look like I've just finished watching the Notebook. I mean, I'd rather have tear-stained cheeks than chunks of ice for eyeballs...