They who sow in tears
In glad song will reap.
He walks along and weeps,
the bearer of the seed-bag.
He will surely come in with glad song
bearing his sheaves.
Psalm 126:6, The Book of Psalms (Robert Alter)
Did you ever have, or do you have, a “life verse?”
I did, for a very long time. It was a trend when I was a young Christian teen, to pick up a verse that summed up how you felt about God or your faith, and then keep it close to heart. We wrote our life verses alongside our signatures in yearbooks, in cards, inscribed it dutifully on young-adult crafts.
Mine was Romans 8:31. What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?
The verse fit. I felt unstoppable in God’s hands; I watched God work all kinds of miracles, everywhere, all the time. I made a lot of mistakes, sinned a lot, but in my continued repentance came to understand that the “God of angel armies” as Chris Tomlin once put it had my back in anything and everything. In short: I lived victoriously, and with a certain that I would continue to live victoriously regardless of what trials God had in store.
And then, you know, the trials actually happened.
In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis writes: “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.” My idea of God growing up was not wrong, to be clear. He is indeed the God of angel armies; He has my back in all things in spite of my failings and frailty; with God, and only with God, I am capable of quite literally anything He wants me to do.
But this idea of God was, as it will perhaps always be, incomplete and not fully formed. I grew up certain God loved me and sure in my redemption; it did not occur to me what He might ask of me as I continued to grow, or that it might be something I struggled to give. I didn’t conceive, growing up blessedly and without much in the way of major trials, what suffering might actually mean. I didn’t imagine a world where God’s desires for my life might conflict with my own. I understood all these things, theologically, intellectually. But I had not imagined what they might mean.
And then the spiderweb cracks appeared in the glass, slowly and over time. My career took detours I hadn’t expected. Beloved pets were diagnosed with rare illnesses. A believer I knew and loved died by suicide. I watched illness and terrible accident claim family members. My mother died terribly; her sister, only a year after. I suddenly started to realize that I, too, am aging.
Psalm 126:6 is a verse I read, and that resonated in my bones, in the first few nights after my Mom died. I wrote about that encounter here; the verse has not left me since. And I find myself particularly enchanted by scholar Robert Alter’s analysis of the verse in the original Hebrew.
The temptation, Alter writes, is to read the Psalm thusly: “[Though] he walks along and weeps, the bearer of the seed-bag, he will surely come in with glad song bearing his sheaves.” But this is not accurate; both in grammar and structure, Alter points out in his notes, the Hebrew invites us to “envision two coordinate images, separated in time and precisely antithetical in meaning.” So instead of a sower walking out to the field weeping, and then returning later singing with sheaves over his shoulder, we see both at once: a sower walking out weeping, and returning in song, overlaid on each other. The joyful future and the grief-stricken present live side by side.
Since then, Psalm 126:6 has become “my” verse. And yet Romans 8:31 remains “my” verse too. Much like the two images in the Psalm, the verses overlap, offering me two sets of eyes: the me who had never encountered suffering, and the me who emerged from it changed. I don’t love suffering any more than I did when I was younger, but I understand it better. The glimpse of God I received when I was in the midst of it I would not have had otherwise. The worship we offer God from suffering is inimitable elsewhere.
To be Christian is to live in dueling tensions at all times. We are now but also not yet; we are redeemed and being redeemed; we rejoice and we grieve at once. To be able to embrace these juxtapositions is holy work, and I believe much of what constitutes deep creativity, hope, and joy lives in these liminal spaces. It’s not something I would have been able to say decades ago; it’s not something I would have understood. And yet I understand now.
We walk out weeping.
We come in singing.
Both and all at once, until the great work is complete.
