We Belong to the Good Shepherd

“I am the Good Shepherd. I know my own sheep and my own sheep know me.” (John 10:14 MSG)

Three years ago, my son and I moved to a goat farm. The goats (and chickens and pigs) belonged to my landlords, so we got all the benefits of living in a pastoral environment without any of the obligation. It’s really a best-case scenario.

Angel is the instigator. Her favorite pastime is jumping over the fence so she can unlock the gate for the other goats. I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard the gate hinge squeaking followed by the persistent tapping of her hooves or horns on my front door. While she usually wants my son to come out and play with her, sometimes she is perfectly happy for my company.

Miss Goat is Angel’s sidekick. If Angel yells, Miss Goat yells about ten seconds later, as if to say, “Yeah, what she said!” She follows closely on Angel’s heels but always seems to know when to pretend she isn’t involved in whatever shenanigans are occurring. Of course, it’s nearly as likely that she truly didn’t notice but wishes she’d been involved. Miss Goat is nearly always caught in a daydream that I can only assume is mostly about being able to jump as high as Angel.

Harley is the bruiser of the bunch. He’s a stocky guy who will just move the other goats out of the way if he’d like to be eating the grass where they are. One day I watched him oh-so-carefully nudge a stubborn chicken until it ran off, just because the chicken was scratching in a tall patch of the yard. Harley adores Miss Goat, but the love seems unrequited, mostly because Miss Goat is too busy making sure she isn’t missing anything Angel is doing.

Davidson is the quiet one. He’s observant, careful, and sweet but often ends up in trouble because he forgets he’s grown up. Since he was little, Davidson has been the one to most frequently get stuck in the fence. The worst part about this is that he won’t say anything when he’s trapped. He just hangs out, eating whatever he can reach, seemingly resigned to his fate (albeit not too upset about it). It’s up to Angel to scream long enough for me or one of my landlords to come rescue him.

The four goats look completely different. Angel is a blonde, Miss Goat is white with a brown head, Harley is ginger like me, and Davidson is mostly brown with some black on his head and feet. Based on these descriptions, anyone would be able to look at a picture and tell them apart. But now that I know these goats, I’d be able to know who was who even if they looked identical.

Angel is the only one who will yell to greet me from across the pond and continue doing so until I acknowledge her. Davidson is the only one who will stand next to me for just a moment after I’ve freed him from the fence, to make eye contact and thank me. Harley is the only one who will lovingly attempt to knock me over in hopes that I have brought food. Miss Goat is the only one whose attention has to be redirected multiple times because she gets distracted by whatever is happening with that leaf over there.

Ultimately, when it comes down to it, I am not their shepherd. Though I will certainly put on boots and tromp through mud to bend a fence for any one of them, they really aren’t my responsibility. They hang out with me on their terms, especially when I have food to offer, but they won’t follow me anywhere. Even so, I have come to know and accept them for who they are. And I have seen how my landlord’s family does shepherd these animals: providing shelter, nourishment, company, and safety.

How much more does Christ understand us, in all our missteps and distractions and yelling for no reason? He comes out to see us when we try to kick his door down in excitement, and he rescues us when we are silently stuck in trouble of our own making. He patiently feeds us even when we’ve been eating all day, he gently places us back on the paths we are supposed to take, and he finds shade for us when the sun is too much to bear.

But Jesus didn’t stop at being our shepherd. He became one of us. He took on the flesh and bones of our weird, silly, amazing species so that we would have the smallest inkling of the depth and breadth and length and height of his love for us.

Today I am struggling to remember this, and even more to understand why Jesus would want to be human. More than four and a half million people have died from a virus worldwide in the past eighteen months, and more in the United States than in any other country.

A massive hurricane bore down on Louisiana, and the hospitals couldn’t be evacuated because there weren’t any open beds in any of the surrounding states.

Afghan refugees literally clung onto airplane wings as the planes flew away, because falling from the sky seemed like a more hopeful option than staying where they were.

Schools opened back up for in-person learning, only to close again after virus outbreaks because mitigating children’s risk has become political.

There are wildfires, earthquakes, and collapsing medical systems, and some of my friends are dead now from the virus and cancer and stroke and suicide. What spare time I have is spent reading peer-reviewed epidemiology papers, giving meager funds to organizations caring for refugees, reducing my beef intake to help with carbon emissions, and taking my as-needed anxiety medication on a much more regular basis than I’d like so I can do my level best at life, but it isn’t enough.

I am not enough.

But Jesus is. He loves us so much that he is here with us in this dumpster fire we’ve started, even though he knows us. He still remembers being one of us, remembers feeling grief, remembers weeping at the state of humanity. He knows that we have not loved God with our whole hearts and that we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves. He knows that we are rarely truly sorry and that we even less often humbly repent. And yet God, our father, shepherds us goats through life nonetheless. God, our mother, gathers us chickens under her wings during storms like these.

Even in the midst of all of this, we still belong to the Good Shepherd, who knows each of us by name.

Bethany Ruth Jabre is a fourth-generation ginger who loves people and their stories, would do best with eighteen hours of sleep a day, has a pair of Converse shoes for every occasion, and sings the third harmony part whenever possible. Though she’ll always be a Texan and a Hoosier, she currently lives in Maryland with her husband, son, and two cats. She believes, along with Julian of Norwich, that “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Photograph © Bethany Ruth Jabre, used with permission