About the Program

Rather than a traditional program that would likely end up in a landfill, we hope you will hold onto our bookmark program and use it in your own home, whether to hold a place in your prayer book or Bible, or simply displayed as a memento for the babies you hold in your heart. On the back of the bookmark, we carefully selected Psalm 125(126) v.5: Those who sow in tears will reap with exceeding joy. This verse reminds us that the tribulations of this life will yield reward in the life to come. Please refer to the quote below, from St. John Chrysostom's Commentary on the Psalms (translated by Robert Charles Hill), for a more complete dialogue with this verse, which captures the heart of the Psalm more perfectly than we could ever hope to: 

Those who sow in tears will reap in joy (v.5) While this is said in reference to the Jews, in many places it could also be referred elsewhere. Virtue is like that, you see: it offers conspicuous reward for its labors; we need firstly to toil and struggle, and then to seek rest. After all, you would find this happening everywhere even in things of this life. For this reason the psalmist also focused on these things, sowing and harvesting. In other words, just as the sower needs to apply effort, sweat and tears, and winter is also required, so too the person practicing virtue: nothing is so unsuited to laxity as a human being. Hence God made this way narrow and constrained — or, rather, not only the practice of virtue: even the things of this life he made laborious, and in fact far more so. I mean, the sower, the builder, the traveler, the woodsman, the artisan — every person who has in mind to gain some advantage needs to apply labor and effort. As the seeds need rain, so we need tears; and as the land has need of ploughing and digging, so too the soul needs trials and tribulations in place of the hoe so that it not bear noxious weeds, that its hardness be softened, that it not be carried away. Soil that is not worked with diligence, remember, produces nothing healthy.

Accordingly, what the inspired author means is this: there is cause to rejoice not only in the return but also in the captivity, and to give thanks to God for both. The latter is the sowing, you see, the former the harvest. Just as the sowers, then, though laboring, enjoy the yield later, so you too, on departing, imitated the sowers by the hardship you underwent, in your weariness and tribulations, putting up with winter, war, clouds and frost by shedding tears. In other words, what rain is to the seeds, tears are to those in tribulation. But lo, he says, accept the reward for these labors.