When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,
we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”
The LORD has done great things for us;
we are glad.
Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like streams in the Negeb!
Those who sow in tears
shall reap with shouts of joy!
He who goes out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
bringing his sheaves with him.
Psalm 126
I became a Christian when I was about 10 years old. Life then looked simple and promising. I thought that with God’s help and guidance, the trajectory of my life would take a safe and peaceful pathway. I imagined smooth stages of adulthood, growing in godliness, tackling life with victory as long as I followed biblical principles and the rules of society. Simple. No problem. Trust and obey to be happy in Jesus, as the hymn claimed. Of course there would be trials, but surely they wouldn’t be that terribly difficult to overcome.
Well, I got older. I witnessed strangers, friends, and family members experience loss and pain in its various forms. I learned belatedly that my parents had dealt with the loss of stillborn twin daughters back when I was about 4 or 5 years old. My hazy memories of that time had left me with a vague awareness of my mom’s pregnancy and the anticipation of baby sisters, but somehow the babies never came, and we never talked about it. Yet, my parents had kept on going, and were able to be decent parents in the midst of their grief, raising my older sister and me in such a way that allowed us to be relatively unscathed. How did they manage to do that?
I went through my own dark valley where I became unsure of whether I could ever feel joy again, even with faith in God. Now, I think that everyone’s life gets touched by pain eventually, and it changes you forever.
Psalm 126 speaks of having our fortunes restored, and joy following our seasons of weeping. What stands out to me is the last portion of the psalm. The theme of sowing while still in tears. It seems that we simply cannot wait until healing arrives. Somehow, we still need to keep going in order to not let the darkness swallow us up. The slow process of healing takes place while we make ourselves get up each morning. It happens while we go to work, attend meetings, cook dinner, pump gas, clean the bathroom. It also happens while we cry out to Jesus, while we do the hard work of talking to a friend or therapist, and also when we crash and burn, ending up crying alone in our car or spending a whole day in bed because we simply just can’t anymore.
Throughout all this, God meets us in our pain, providing us with a little light for each additional step. As we wait in our darkness, keep sowing, keep working, keep fighting. Keep clinging to his promises that he will give us strength for each day. And one day, we will find ourselves having actually exited from the complete darkness into a new season of light, able to feel joy and experience laughter again, with our own song of ascent, glad because of the great thing God has done for us.
Jasmine Lowell is the international education coordinator for the Center for Global Engagement at Hope College.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.