September 08, 2022
Daily Devotion:
"Degree of Pain ..."
Psalm 126:5-6
New International Version
5 Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. 6 Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.
Today's featured passage is all about pain and gain. About exile and restoration. Resignation and exhilaration. Hopelessness and hope. Seventy years of scorn, rebuke, and humiliation certainly ought to get one's attention! It could just as easily have backfired, generating bitterness and resentment against God. Indeed many of the Jews died during the exile, having never witnessed the promised restoration. Not all tears reap joy. It is only after we finally emerge from the pain that we can fully appreciate what we have gone through to get there. In the midst of the ordeal, there is mostly pain-not gain. So what about those who, throughout an entire lifetime, never experience the joy? In hurting, seldom-seen "third world" are millions whose tragically brief lives are filled only with tears, whether shed or unshed. They're the truly hungry. The perpetual oppressed and brutalized who dread the approaching shadows of each night and fear the knock on the door...if they even have a door. For those of us fortunate enough never to experience such abject horror and despair, what greater of we might feel if somehow, someway we could actually increase our lesser pain in order to lessen their greater pain. For all of us, of course, the ultimate joy can never be known in this life, only in the life to come when we will look back on whatever degree of pain we have known as if it never existed!
The hope-filled question is: What "seeds of pain" am I sowing now that soon will bloom into sheer joy?
