Sowing in a Dry Year

He goes out anyway. That is the whole of it and he does not make a thing of it.

Ten years he has been praying for his son-in-law, which is a strange relationship to be doing this in, and he has never told his daughter, and he would be mortified if she knew. The man is decent and hardworking and thinks all of it is nonsense in a pleasant, entirely unhostile way, and he says so at Thanksgiving, cheerfully, and everybody laughs including Dwight.

And every morning at about ten past five Dwight sits in the truck for a couple of minutes before he starts it, and prays for him, and has done since before the grandchildren were born.

Nothing has happened. Nothing has moved an inch in ten years. If anything the man is further out than he was, in a settled and comfortable way, and the grandchildren are being raised in that house with none of it, which is the part that gets Dwight at about three in the morning and which he does not mention to anybody either.

Here is what has changed in him, and it is worth naming because it is not what people assume.

He has not stopped. He is not going to stop. What has gone is any expectation attached to it. He goes out in the morning the way a man goes out to sow in the eighth year of a dry stretch: with the bag, because that is what you do, and with no picture in his head of standing in a crop, because he has not been able to hold that picture for about four years and pretending otherwise would be a kind of lying.

If you are sowing without expectation, hear the question. Which verse said the going out had to feel like hope?

The psalm puts the weeping in the going out

He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.Psalm 126:6

Read where the weeping is placed, because it is not where people expect.

He that goeth forth and weepeth. The weeping is in the going out. It is not a preliminary that gets sorted out before the sowing starts, and it is not a sign that a man has lost his faith and should stay home. The psalm describes somebody carrying seed and crying at the same time, and it does not treat that as a contradiction or as a problem to be fixed before the work is valid.

That is the picture of a man in a truck at ten past five with no expectation left. The psalm has room for him. It has him in it by name.

You are the man the verse describes, and it is already the shape it names, and the weeping is inside the going out rather than instead of it. I am not putting a good face on ten dry years. It is written in Psalm 126:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm about a man crying on his way to a field and lays it in a truck cab before dawn.

What doubtless does and does not settle

Now, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing is a strong phrase, and I want to handle it honestly, because the wrong handling would give Dwight a promise nobody can keep.

The psalm is a general truth about the way God works with sowing and reaping, and it is not a personal guarantee about a specific man's son-in-law on a specific timetable. Anybody who reads it to you that way has made God the guarantor of an outcome He did not sign for, and the day it does not arrive on schedule you will have lost more than you started with.

Here is what the verse does settle. That the sowing is not wasted work in a universe that does not care. That sowing and rejoicing are connected in the economy God actually runs. That a man carrying seed into a dry field is doing something real, and that God knows about it, and that the crying does not disqualify it.

You are doing something real in an economy that connects sowing to harvest, and it is already the arrangement, and nobody has told you when. Scripture says he that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a general truth hold a man steady without ever turning into a date.

The seed is not his

And here is the phrase in the middle that a farmer would notice and that changes the weight of the whole thing.

Bearing precious seed. The seed is called precious, and the man is described as bearing it, which is a carrying word. He did not make it. In an agricultural economy the seed comes from somewhere: last year's crop, a store, a neighbor. The sower is a man entrusted with something valuable and putting it in the ground.

Dwight has been carrying the ten years as though the whole enterprise were his own project, funded out of his own pocket, with a return he is failing to generate.

He is a man carrying somebody else's precious seed into a field. That is a completely different job, and it is one he has never failed at once in ten years, because the job is the carrying and the putting in, and he has done it every morning at ten past five.

You are entrusted with something rather than responsible for the yield, and it is already precious seed and not your own investment. It is written that he bears precious seed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives the seed and does the growing in ground nobody can see into.