There’s an old shepherd with five sheep dogs meandering about the side of a hill not far from where I’m sitting. The sheep seem well-behaved enough – none
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| At Castelnor, Romania |
are nibbling their way lost at the moment. The dogs slowly saunter around the flock, making sure that they meander together, in one large herd. Occasionally the lead dog will stop, sit down, or maybe lie down, giving the rest of the herd a chance to catch up. The other dogs slowly, calmly walking around the outside of the herd keeping everyone together. And the Shepherd, he just moseys alongside the herd, carrying his stick, as if this is all routine, which I am pretty sure it is. Monotonously so, perhaps.
I have often thought of those images in scripture whenever I encounter such scenes in real life. And I think of the more familiar passages first – Psalm 23: “The LORD is my Shepherd; I shall not want.” Or sometimes I imagine the shepherd bending down to retrieve that one lone sheep, lifting it up onto his shoulders, and carrying it back to the fold. Maybe you have as well.
I imagine that little if anything has changed in the last 2,000 years or more. Shepherds guide their herds from one pastureland to another, day after day after day. The wind, a dog barking to scare away something it has perhaps heard, the bleating of the sheep as they trod along en masse, and of course the bell. That monotonous bell!
And yet, some how I believe it is somehow comforting to the sheep that this clanging noise is nearby. There is an assurance that I’m not too far away, that there is safety in numbers, that the shepherd can still see me. “I AM the Good Shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me.”
It is hard to really dwell on these kinds of things in our fast-paced, urgent, “get-it-done-yesterday” world. We move so quickly through our lives, noticing something as slow-paced is most likely a blur on our way to somewhere else that we’re probably late for. And all the while, the Good Shepherd is looking for us – searching high and low, wondering where we’ve wandered off to this time.
What does it take for us to slow down in our lives a bit? To take a break from the real monotony of trying to get ahead, or even stay above water? To actually look up from our fast-paced lives, listen for the Good Shepherd who is calling our name? Maybe there is something to this shepherding thing. Maybe we indeed “like sheep have all gone astray.”
Perhaps it’s time for us to once again rejoin the herd of Christian sisters and brothers, to follow the Good Shepherd, and to know what it means to “lie down in green pastures,” be led by the “still waters,” and know what it feels like to have Him “restore our souls.”
See you in Church!
