On Shepherds and Comfort

Yesterday, I looked out of the window over my kitchen sink. There, exuding all the joy of young animals, were all the weaned lambs. They’ve been trying out grass, and this is a relatively new pasture experience for them. It’s a new experience for me too. My brother-in-law, Shepherd Dan, has never kept the weaned lambs at our house before. Usually, after they’re toddlers and they go on to be weaned, they go back to the barn at his place.

So now, for the first time, I get to observe teenage lambs up close!

Over the years, as I’ve been observing the process of Shepherd Dan’s shepherding, I’ve been struck by how the metaphors used in the Bible are so right-on. Maybe they’re not as relevant to everyone living in suburbia, far from the smell of freshly-spread manure and the sounds of animals who think the truck pulling in is their meal ticket.

But for us, the sheep are like a living Bible passage.

And so, this week, I want to share a passage that is poetry to me, if poetry is, in fact, a body of words that evokes feeling and appreciation and joy. It has been a poem – if I may call it that – that I have come back to, again and again. I have prayed it when there have been no other words, in times of intense sorrow and times of intense joy. These are the words that came to my mind when I sat in Adoration, praying for Logan. These are the words that came to my mind when I held each of my daughters for the first time. These are the words that I can’t help but mutter as I scoot outside in my robe and slippers in the early morning hours to get a picture of the lambs in the back pasture.