“Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy. They weep as they go to plant their seed, but they sing as they return with the harvest.”
— Psalms 126:5-6

I wish life were filled with nothing but happy endings. Wouldn’t that be great? The guy always gets the girl. You buy the winning lottery ticket. You conquer every battle. You ride off into the perfect sunset on a beautiful horse, with the wind at your back and not a care in the world. It’s the stuff of fairytales.

But that’s not real life, is it?

In reality, sometimes the pain feels like it’s winning. The tears seem to come more often than the laughter. You try everything you can, give it your best effort, pour out your heart—and still, it doesn’t work out the way you hoped. The relationship falls apart. The dream dies. The healing doesn’t come. The doors stay closed.

The pain of life is real.

I’ve felt it. I’ve been there—in the dark places where disappointment echoes louder than hope, where grief seems to have the final word. And to be honest, I don’t connect well with people who pretend that life is always wrapped up in neat, happy endings. It’s hard to relate to someone who acts like they’ve never struggled, never questioned, never wept.

Because life is hard. It breaks us sometimes.

And if we’re not careful, pain can do more than hurt us—it can trap us. We start to believe that we are nothing more than our brokenness, victims of circumstances we can’t control. It’s easy to feel stuck, immobilized by heartache, weighed down by disappointment. When that happens, any movement feels impossible. And if we do move, it’s often backwards—slipping into old habits, reaching for temporary fixes to numb the ache, doing whatever we can to avoid feeling the weight of it all.

But here’s the thing: you can move forward, even with the pain.

That’s what gripped me about Psalm 126. We often rush to the second part of the verse—“shouts of joy,” “singing,”—because we long for that. We crave the harvest, the breakthrough, the victory. But don’t miss the beginning. Don’t overlook the tears.

“Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy.”

The joy doesn’t come instead of the pain. It comes through it.
The harvest isn’t the reward for avoiding sorrow. It’s the result of showing up in spite of it.

These verses describe people who didn’t wait until their hearts were healed to start planting. They didn’t pause their lives until the pain passed. No—they planted while they wept. They carried their grief in one hand and their seeds in the other. They kept moving forward, step by aching step, with tears streaming down their faces. They didn’t wait for joy to start working; they worked their way toward joy.

And that’s what courage looks like.
It’s not the absence of pain—it’s the determination to move through it.

I deeply admire people who live like that. The ones who carry their grief like a heavy backpack, yet still manage to put one foot in front of the other. The ones who show up, even when it hurts. The ones who keep planting, keep trying, keep believing—not because it’s easy, but because giving up isn’t an option.

Maybe that’s you. Maybe today, you’re doing it with pain. You’re loving your family through heartbreak. You’re working hard while grieving losses no one sees. You’re holding onto hope with shaky hands.

I want you to know this: you are not stuck.
You are not a victim of your pain.
You are moving forward—slowly, maybe—but forward nonetheless.

Your tears are not a sign of weakness. They are the water that softens the soil where your seeds will grow.

So, keep planting.
Keep walking.
Keep believing.

Joy is coming. Not because the pain will magically disappear, but because you’re doing the sacred, courageous work of living through it. One day, the same ground you wept over will burst forth with life. And you’ll sing—not because the road was easy, but because you did it anyway.

Joy comes.
Just keep moving.