Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves;
Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
Sowing in the sunshine, sowing in the shadows,
Fearing neither clouds nor winter's chilling breeze;
By and by the harvest, and the labor ended,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
Going forth with weeping, sowing for the Master,
Though the loss sustained our spirit often grieves;
When our weeping’s over, He will bid us welcome,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.
Public domain hymn text (published 1874). Words by Knowles Shaw.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Knowles Shaw was an American evangelist and singer widely known throughout his own lifetime by the popular nickname 'the Singing Evangelist,' who traveled extensively and almost constantly across the American South and Midwest during the years immediately following the American Civil War, credited over the course of his relatively brief but intensely active ministry with personally leading many thousands of individual converts to Christian faith through his distinctive combination of direct evangelistic preaching and skilled congregational song leading at his revival meetings.
He wrote this hymn's text directly out of Psalm 126:6 — 'He who continually goes forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him' — deliberately transforming the ancient agricultural image of a farmer patiently sowing grain in confident hope of an eventual future harvest into an extended metaphor for the ongoing, often difficult work of active Christian witness: specifically, the patient, sometimes genuinely painful and emotionally costly work of repeatedly sharing one's own faith with others who may not respond, sustained across years of apparently unrewarded effort only by continued confidence in an eventual, cumulative spiritual harvest still to come.
Shaw's own life ended abruptly and unexpectedly in June 1878, at only forty-two years old, when the passenger train he was traveling aboard en route to his next scheduled revival engagement suddenly derailed near the town of McKinney, Texas, in a serious railroad accident; Shaw survived the initial derailment itself but died from his resulting injuries the following day, cutting short a revival ministry that had, by that point, already reached an extraordinary number of towns and congregations across the postwar American South and Midwest.
The hymn he remains best remembered for today is, quite fittingly given the sudden and unfinished circumstances of his own early death, itself fundamentally a hymn about faithfully continuing and completing one's assigned work of sowing seed even without ever personally witnessing its full eventual harvest — Shaw himself, dying suddenly at the height of his own active ministry, never lived to see the full, eventual harvest of the countless congregations across multiple generations who would go on to sing his hymn about sowing and reaping long after his own unexpectedly early death.
