I’ve been thinking about farming lately.
Not because I have a green thumb. I don’t even have a green pinky!
I’ve been thinking about farming lately, because I want to be okay with things growing slowly & changing gradually in my life.
Psalm 126 teaches us that life breaks down into sudden work & slow work.
The psalm opens by remembering the good ‘ole days. The days of laughter, joy, & gladness. The seasons of reaping abundantly. The times when everything works & all see clearly, The Lord has done great things for us.
All of our lives are marked by days like these. Perhaps it’s the wide-open opportunities of youth & the rapid changes that come. Or the “honeymoon” phase of marital simplicity & bliss. Or the thrill of a new job or new career that fills daily life with purpose.
What marks these days good ‘ole days is sudden work. Life is easy. Fruit is quick & abundant. Purpose is clear. Joy is full. So, it’s no surprise that the psalmist looks back fondly on these days & longs for them to return.
But Psalm 126 doesn’t stop there.
While life includes seasons of sudden work, the vast majority of life is slow work.
AGRICULTURAL TIME
Psalm 126 ends with a call to keep sowing & in so doing underlines a very important biblical principle.
Throughout the Bible, the dominant metaphors for the Christian life are agricultural. The word of the gospel is compared to a seed (Mark 4:1-9). This seed is planted by one, watered by another, & still later bears fruit by God (1 Cor. 3:6). The righteous man is compared to a tree that grows slowly & steadily (Psa. 1). Israel is a vine (Isa. 5). And the Christian is a branch of the vine of Jesus, that is regularly pruned to bear more fruit (John 15).
Author David Powlison sums it up saying, “We twenty-first century people are hasty folk. We like things to happen fast. We want problems to have quick solutions so we can move on to something else. But God has made our souls to work on agricultural time.”
These metaphors teach us that the vast majority of life is slow, hard work.
Most of life is farming, sowing & waiting on the rain to come. Most of life is spent not in the celebration of harvest but in the steady hum of long, tiring days of sowing.
Most of life is not reaping.
Most of life is marked by acts of sowing—doing the same things day in & day out & trusting God to produce a harvest. Laundry. Dinner. Dishes. Long hours at work. Rising early to read & pray. Carving out time to teach your children. Helping with homework. Inviting a new friend over when you’d rather nap.
CHEEP UP! THE HARVEST ISN’T IN YET!
All this may seem like hard news, but it’s not. It means at least two encouraging things:
1. It’s not harvest time yet.
It can be quite freeing to realize that we shouldn’t be looking to reap yet.
We shouldn’t expect the kids to obey fully, marriage to continue blissfully, friendships to come easily, or work to satisfy completely. If they did, there would be no need to sow.
But if we approach our daily life planning to sow, then it’ll change what we expect each day & how we approach each day.
2. Keep sowing, because the harvest comes to those who continue to sow.
Psalm 126 concludes with an encouragement: Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy!
Those who sow will reap. Not because they sowed perfectly, but because they sowed faithfully.
Galatians 6:9 similarly adds, And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.
May God help us to press on!