Those who Sow in Tears
Sometimes we loose things, important things. Maybe it was our sunglasses or our wallet. Maybe it was our friend or our innocence. And maybe it was our faith or our purpose or our belief that everything will work out.
One of the things that the Psalms do is to honestly name our losses, but doing so in the context of finding God. It’s not like finding God make the losses go away. And finding God certainly doesn’t mean that the losses make sense. In fact, sometimes finding God just means scrounging up enough faith to yell and accuse and question God. For example, listen in to Psalm 44:
But you crushed us and made us a haunt for jackals; you covered us over with deep darkness. - Psalm 44:19
When Shannon Fernando preached on Sunday she kept referencing times like this. And she kept pointing out what it says in Psalm 126, that we sow with tears. For her that meant that we still keep doing the work of the kingdom, even though we’re crying all along the way. We still press forward, watering the seeds of hope with our tears of pain. Our tears would be the rain that would make those seeds grow. Such painful and yet redemptive insights.
Shannon asked us each to say ‘Persist’ out loud a couple of times at the end of the message. It was not to pretend that there’s not pain but to remember that God, somehow, is still there and still honoring our pain in the process of sowing.
Persist.