The following
article is based on a sermon by missionary Del Tarr who
served fourteen years in West Africa with another mission
agency. His story points out the price some people pay to
sow the seed of the gospel in hard soil.
I was always perplexed by Psalm 126
until I went to the Sahel, that vast stretch of savanna more
than four thousand miles wide just under the Sahara Desert.
In the Sahel, all the moisture comes in a four month period:
May, June, July, and August. After that, not a drop of rain
falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and
so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up
the dust and throw it thousands of feet into the air. It
then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine
grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets inside your watch
and stops it. The year's food, of course, must all be grown
in those four months. People grow sorghum or milo in small
fields.
October and November...these are
beautiful months. The granaries are full -- the harvest has
come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day. The
sorghum is ground between two stones to make flour and then
a mush with the consistency of yesterday's Cream of Wheat.
The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls
between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then
pop it into their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their
stomachs so they can sleep.
December comes, and the granaries
start to recede. Many families omit the morning meal.
Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating
two meals a day.
By February, the evening meal diminishes.
The meal shrinks even more during
March and children succumb to sickness. You don't stay well
on half a meal a day.
April is the month that haunts my
memory. In it you hear the babies crying in the twilight.
Most of the days are passed with only an evening cup of
gruel.
Then, inevitably, it happens. A six-or
seven-year-old boy comes running to his father one day with
sudden excitement. "Daddy! Daddy! We've got grain!" he
shouts. "Son, you know we haven't had grain for weeks."
"Yes, we have!" the boy insists. "Out in the hut where we
keep the goats -- there's a leather sack hanging up on the
wall -- I reached up and put my hand down in there -- Daddy,
there's grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make
flour, and tonight our tummies can sleep!"
The father stands motionless. "Son, we
can't do that," he softly explains. "That's next year's seed
grain. It's the only thing between us and starvation. We're
waiting for the rains, and then we must use it." The rains
finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy
watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does
the most unreasonable thing imaginable. Instead of feeding
his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and
with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious
seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt! Why?
Because he believes in the harvest.
The seed is his; he owns it. He can do
anything with it he wants. The act of sowing it hurts so
much that he cries. But as the African pastors say when they
preach on Psalm 126, "Brother and sisters, this is God's law
of the harvest. Don't expect to rejoice later on unless you
have been willing to sow in tears." And I want to ask you:
How much would it cost you to sow in tears? I don't mean
just giving God something from your abundance, but finding a
way to say, "I believe in the harvest, and therefore I will
give what makes no sense. The world would call me
unreasonable to do this -- but I must sow regardless, in
order that I may someday celebrate with songs of joy."
Next Section -
Committed to the Great
Commission
