This grabbed me in today’s Psalm:

Those who sow with tears will reap with joy.
Those who go out weeping carrying seed to sow,
Will return with songs of joy,
Carrying sheaves with them.
Psalm 126:5-6

Sorrow & Seeds

Sorrow makes you sober, it awakens us from the illusions of life, the things we are tempted to settle for which will not satisfy. If you are in a season of sorrow you have something that you can sow, and the promise is God is growing something deep within you. But you have to be willing to wait for the seedlings to grow. You can not rush it. Buying a bunch of bright flowers from Tesco and forcing them in the ground won’t work.

Contrast

The poetry of verse 5 is stunning contrasting sorrow associated with ending, now a seed carrying new and greater life. The reaping scythe, the archetypal tool of death, now releasing joy.

Suffering and song go hand in hand. Francesco Lotoro, an Italian music teacher, has been cataloging the thousands of musical works composed in concentration, labour, and prisoner of war camps during the Second World War.

This disconcertingly upbeat cabaret song, "Reischsbahlied" (Railway Song), by Ljowa Berniker, a 19 year old Lithuanian Jew in a camp in Riga, joyful music describing the miserable treatment of the Jews in the camp.

Or Czech composer Rudolf Karel’s tender Nonet, (image above) who was not allowed access to notepaper, but when he suffered from dysentery was able to use toilet paper as manuscript and his charcoal medicine as ink are profound examples of this collision of extremes.

The Duet

But the comfort in these words is not that if we do this, (to sing in our sorrow) it alone will be cathartic. But that he is with us as we do this:

He walks along and weeps, The bearer of the seed bag. He will surely come in with glad song Bearing his sheaves. - Robert Altar Translation

Jesus is not the author of our sadness but he is the farmer of our joy. And when we sing it is never a solo as he is singing with us.