"Those who go out weeping, carrying precious seed to sow, will return home rejoicing, carrying sheaves with them.” Ps. 126:5

There are tears that accompany the sowing of the message of Christ's love. The stories of the fallen, the lost, and the downtrodden are often woven through with such confusion and heartache. They take us into places so dark, where wickedness has been unleashed with its betrayals, treacheries, deceits, and deceptions, that we cannot enter and leave entirely unscathed or untouched.

A Christian carries the burdens of people whose lives have been battered and broken. To enter into their world, if only for a moment, broadens our understanding of why Jesus was called "a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief."

And so, when someone quietly gives, serves, encourages, and loves, entering into these domains of darkness, it is sometimes difficult not to wonder whether any good will come of it. The suffering can be so deep, the brokenness so complicated, and the darkness so entrenched that the seeds of love seem to disappear into the ground without a trace.

But this verse gives us the assurance that our labor is not in vain.

The promise is not that sowing will be painless, nor that every harvest will come according to our timetable. It is that God is able to bring a harvest from faithful sowing. What is planted in faith is entrusted to Him.

We may never see the full fruit of our labor, nor know how deeply a word of kindness, an act of compassion, or a seed of truth has taken root in another person's life. But we are not called to measure the harvest; we are called to faithfully sow the seed.

And it may be one day, in the presence of the One who knows every tear and sees every hidden act of love, we will discover that some of the seeds we thought were lost were quietly growing all along.