They Did Not Wait to Feel Better
"Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them."
— Psalm 126:5-6
Fifteen songs in a row carry the same one line heading, and this is one of them. The first half looks back at a time when God turned things around for Zion, and the song never says when that was. The line right before these two asks him to do it again, like water in the Negev, where the channels of that southern desert lie dry most of the year and fill in a rush after rain. Then the song drops into farm work. In the hill country north of there, grain went into the ground in autumn, once the first rains had softened it, and what was cut came months later in spring. A whole winter sat between the two jobs. The grain kept back for planting was the same grain that would otherwise have been ground into flour, so what went into the ground was bread nobody ate. A sheaf is simply a bundle of cut stalks tied in the field where they fell. What went into the ground in tears was not lost, and the harvest that came back was God's to give.