What The Lord Does With Our Tears

Psalm 126 is one of the Songs of Ascent—the songs Israel sang as they climbed toward Jerusalem—and it asks a question most of us would rather avoid: what are we supposed to do with our tears?

When real grief arrives, most of us improvise. We suppress it, performing an okay-ness we don't feel because faith is supposed to look strong. Or we drown in it, quietly deciding God isn't going to act and giving up on the field altogether. There's even a third way we get it wrong—we mount the wound on the wall, letting grief become the identity we're known by, the reason we never have to risk anything again. Psalm 126 refuses all three.

Instead, it hands us a stranger image: go out weeping, and carry the seed with you. The psalm remembers a time when God restored the fortunes of Zion and filled his people's mouths with laughter (vv. 1–3). Then it turns to prayer in a season of drought, asking God to send streams in the Negeb—the kind of sudden, undeserved transformation only he can bring (v. 4). And it closes with a promise stated twice for emphasis in the Hebrew: those who sow in tears will surely reap with shouts of joy (vv. 5–6).

Tears, in this psalm, are not interruptions to faith. They are the seed of it.

This is exactly what Jesus did. He wept. In Gethsemane he went out carrying the weight of the world, and like a grain of wheat he was buried in the ground—and rose with the harvest. The resurrection is the flash flood in the Negeb. Because of it, the tears we bring to God are never buried alone, and they never stay buried.

The harvest is not in question. The only question is whether we'll keep going out.