Come Home to the Shepherd
Did you know that YouTube actually has ten hours of uninterrupted “sheep noises” available for your listening pleasure?
I’m not sure why you would know that or why you would care even if you did know it. Ten years ago, I would not have dreamed that I would need sheep noises either.
However, if you one day suddenly find yourself, like me, living an unexpected life as a farmer’s wife, and even more surprisingly, you find yourself raising sheep and then losing one somewhere in the woods on your farm, you might do what I did one unseasonably warm March day.
You might search the Internet for sheep noises in hopes that your missing ram would hear all the ladies calling for him and decide to come back home.
Having grown up in a sprawling suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the irony of the fact that I currently live on a nearly 100-acre farm in East Tennessee with pigs and sheep and chickens and ducks and geese is never lost on me.
And as a city girl now living in the country, my education is continual. Every single moment of farming means I am learning something new. Did you know guinea fowl eat ticks? What about the fact that there are hair sheep you don’t have to shear? Did you know chickens lay larger eggs as they age? By golly, geese truly do goose people! Oh, and the expression “Like ducks on a June bug” is a statement that speaks for itself when those bugs infest our farm every summer.
The learning is continual.
In addition, the parallels between farming and the Bible never end. I find myself walking the hills thinking about the Lord much more than I did before we moved to the middle of nowhere. By being a shepherd myself, I feel I understand more of who God is.
A few weeks ago, one of our farm volunteers made an error. That error resulted in our male sheep (which is called a ram for all of you novice farmers) running off. Everyone came home except Captain, that one stubborn ram. He ran up into the woods, and hours later he still hadn’t come home.
My husband was at work. That left me to try to find the missing sheep. This resulted in me googling sheep noises, finding the aforementioned video on YouTube, and feverishly making my way through a proverbial needle in a haystack to see if I could entice Captain to come back home.
“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? 5 And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders 6 and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’” (Luke 15:4 NIV)
Do you know how impossible it is to find a needle in a haystack? Do you know how big sixty acres feels when you have to find one sheep?
At some point I gave up. I turned my sheep noises on louder, found a dry grassy area, lay down, and started praying. I asked the Lord to help me find the ram, and I prayed that God would lead him home.
God did!
Mere minutes after I threw my hands in the air and gave up the fight to find the ram, Captain wandered down from the woods and into the pasture he calls home. My phone changed from spouting sheep noises to playing my “Where the Green Grass Grows” ring tone. The same farm volunteer had spotted him peeking his head out of the woods and enticed him with handfuls of alfalfa to return to his companions.
While you can read the Bible all day long, to see it come alive in the flesh is simply awe-inspiring. As I prayed in the grass that day, I thought of my Heavenly Father and how he loves me so fiercely that he would leave all his other sheep to find me. I wondered how it felt to be God, watching us wandering through the woods and refusing to come home. While God isn’t googling sheep noises, I can only imagine the various ways he is trying to find ways to remind us and encourage us to come back to our first love.
Come home!
I know better!
I know where you’ll be happier with me as your shepherd!
I knew that if we didn’t get that ram home before the day’s end, his ability to survive without the protection of his flock and our fencing would be greatly impacted. I knew that there were predators who could take him down once the sun went down. I knew his life was in danger.
He didn’t know that.
But I did.
“For he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. Today, if only you would hear his voice . . .” (Psalm 95:7 NIV)
Today I encourage you to remind yourself that God loves you far more than this city girl loves her one little ram. And yet I was willing to put my entire day on hold to find him. God is doing the same for you. Continually. He is calling your name. He is striving to bring you into the safety and comfort of his pasture.
“He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.” (Psalm 23:2 NIV)
So come on out of the woods. Come home.
is a former city girl now living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee with her husband and four young children. She is passionate about the causes of infertility, adoption, and keeping it real as a mom. You can follow her at flakymn.blogspot.com or becauseofisaac.org.
Photograph © Nadia Supertino, used with permission
