Of Tears and Scripture

Below is a blog I posted long ago on MySpace, but was reminded of it recently, as it seems to be extremely appropriate considering the last few days in my life, and some of its truth speaks to me out of the past even now as I re-read it.

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God pulled me into a journey this week, and I have to admit it was not one of those times where I was excited about what He was doing. It was challenging, it was hard, and it drained me more than I realized. But then He brought me to this passage:

Psalm 126:5-6 - "May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy! He that goes forth weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him."

What does this mean? I had read this passage before and honestly didn't absorb it too much. But now the light is shed upon it, like a door with sunlight behind it opened on a dark and dusty shack, revealing some forgotten treasure hidden within.
That treasure is hope. It is hard for us to do His will when life is not going so well. When we are challenged every day to the point of wanting to fall over (and sometimes giving in). It is a hard thing that the wounded are still commanded to fight. But God is not cruel, He simply sees everything, whereas we do not. God sees the other end of this thing, even beyond the particular hard time we are going through, and He tells us it is good. He looks beyond the storm in which you are casting seeds in the mud, and He tells you that one day you will leap with joy through these same fields when they are overripe with abundance.
So what does this mean to those of us who can't farm? People. People are watching you. They are watching to see how you handle the good times and the bad. I submit to you that hard times allow for better planting in them, like the storm that softens the soil. The bad times require more reliance on God, and that is the visible thing that God can use to save souls. Thus we will rejoice one day, though we do not see it now, when the fruit of our labors are revealed to enjoy.
And so it is with this hope in mind that I say this:

Well, O My Tears, if you will not leave me, then you will water the seeds.

A Short Word on Invisible Fruit

1 Corinthians 15:58 - "Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain."

Galatians 6:9 - "And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up."

Many, and I would venture to say all of you who read this will at some point in your life encounter a time where you feel as though your work bears no spiritual fruit. You make real effort to evangelize, only to face indifference. You toil in youth ministry only to see kids become more bored. You preach every day, begging a flock to see how God is better than what they are living for, yet they only check their watches. This is a very hard time.

But be not discouraged, brothers and sisters. For God has ordained that some be sowers and others be harvesters, and all of us both at different times. You could spend your entire life sacrificing everything to evangelism, and yet not see a single soul come to know Christ, and your work would not be in vain. You are sowing. When you do see someone come to know Him, you are often harvesting that which others have sown in the past and saw no fruit.

And so we might draw some bit of encouragement from the fact that our work is not in vain. Though we may see no fruit in something we are lead to do, God will not hold back His reward from you, for only He is able to see the full measure of effect which our obedience has on the world.

A Brief Thought on Sex and the Golden Compass

In an interview for Atlantic Monthly, Philip Pullman, author of the Golden Compass, told Hannah Rosin regarding sex and the alleged Christian repression thereof:

"Why the Christian Church has spent 2,000 years condemning this glorious moment, well, that's a mystery. I want to confront that, I suppose, by telling a story that the so-called original sin is anything but. It's the thing that makes us fully human."

I do indeed agree that sex is a glorious moment, something that God designed for our pleasure and worship of Him, and is indeed full of Him. However, the idea that we ought to be completely sexually "free" in the sense of being able to follow our every sexual instinct, does not make us more fully human. Indeed, it makes us more fully animal.