Sheep have The Right Of Way
Steve, and I headed out of the parking lot at the Dublin airport in our rental car. We knew that driving on the left side of the road would take some adjustment, but the narrowness of the roads was a surprise.
About twenty miles from the airport our dual highway faded away, and we found ourselves on our first highly anticipated Irish country road.
I screamed at Steve to move more to the center as bramble bushes almost whisked against my window.
Of course, he couldn’t move more to the center or he would have hit oncoming cars.
As we rounded a corner, a scene this city girl would never have imagined halted our progress completely.
A flock of sheep meandered along the road, jostling for position as they squeezed out of a gate on our right and turned onto the road ahead of us.
A man at the front of the flock was yelling back to them and his black-and-white dog scurried around the edges of the flock, nudging the sheep to move along.
We inched along behind them for about ten minutes. It was a fascinating sight, and we laughed at the reality of these dirty, smelly animals presiding over a public thoroughfare.
Just as we began to wonder where they were going and how long it would take them to get there, their shepherd opened a gate on the left side of the road. The sheep crowded to rush through to the grassy meadow.
By the time they had all moved from one field to another, lines of backed-up traffic flowed in both directions. The shepherd waved to us smiled and closed the gate behind the last of his flock.
This twenty-first-century encounter with a shepherd brought a smile to my spirit as I thought of the familiar words to the opening verse of the Twenty-third Psalm: “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.”
But as I watched the Irish shepherd I realized that I don’t often bring the reality of the Lord as my own Shepherd into my daily life. In the most humble ways, this Irishman cared for his sheep.
And he did it in a way that presumed that everyone understood that the sheep had precedence over the cars on the road.
We are the sheep of our Father. He cares for us in the most basic, as well as the most profound, ways.
Father, thank you for your personal care, as tender as that of a shepherd tending his sheep.