Cast Sheep

I didn't know what a cast sheep was until one day we were on a Sunday drive in the country, small child, looking out the car window. I saw a sheep on its back, legs in the air, struggling to get up. I pointed it out. My father pulled over immediately, got out of the car, jumped the farm fence, and with all the strength he had, he tipped it up on its right side. Off it went.

I didn't forget that. I didn't know what I'd seen, exactly, but I knew it mattered that Dad stopped.

A cast sheep is one that has rolled onto its back and can't right itself. It happens when the animal is heavily fleeced, or pregnant, or has settled into a hollow in the ground. The centre of gravity shifts. It rolls. And then it just lies there, legs in the air, completely unable to get up.

It isn't fighting. It isn't making a fuss. It's just stuck.

If the shepherd doesn't come, the sheep dies. Not dramatically. It can't breathe properly in that position. Gases build up. The organs are compressed. Within hours, it's gone. A sheep that looked perfectly healthy in the morning can be dead by evening, and all it did was lie down in the wrong place.

I have been thinking about this for a long time in relation to people in the church.

Not the people who left in anger. Not the ones who made their exit loudly and let everyone know exactly why. I'm thinking about the ones who just went quiet. Who used to be at everything and then weren't. Who stopped answering messages. Who, if you pressed them, might say they were fine — but something in their eyes said otherwise.

They aren't rebelling. They aren't walking away from God. They are cast. They got into a position — through grief, through something someone said, through a failure they couldn't recover from publicly, through a season of depression they couldn't explain — and they couldn't right themselves. And they've been lying there ever since.

The question a shepherd asks is not what is wrong with that sheep. The question is where is it?

A good shepherd checks the flock. Not just the visible flock, the ones gathered at the gate waiting for feed. The whole paddock. He walks the boundary. He looks in the long grass. He counts.

In thirty-plus years of prison work, I met a lot of cast people. They weren't hard to find if you were looking. They were invisible to everyone who wasn't.

The families of prisoners are cast people in most of our churches. They are carrying something enormous and they are carrying it alone, because the shame of it means they can't say it out loud on a Sunday morning. They didn't roll over all at once. It happened gradually. A comment here. A silence there. A sense that their situation was too complicated for the normal programmes. And one day they looked up and couldn't get back to where they'd been.

I'm not just writing about prisoners' families. That's just where I've seen it most clearly.

When you right a cast sheep, you don't drag it upright and send it off to fend for itself. You hold it for a while. The circulation has been cut off. The legs don't work properly at first. You have to stay with it while it gets its feet under it again.

That's not a metaphor. That's just what you do.

The question for every church is not whether you have cast sheep. You do. The question is whether anyone is walking the paddock to find them.

But here is what I want you to know, if you are the one on your back right now.

That day on the Sunday drive, there was no farmer in sight. No shepherd. No one whose job it was to check the paddock. Just a sheep struggling alone, and my father who happened to look out the window and stop the car.

He didn't have to. He wasn't the shepherd. He just saw the need and he went.

Your Heavenly Father is like that. He sees the whole paddock. Every hollow, every patch of long grass, every place a sheep could have rolled and be lying unseen. He is not waiting to be told. He is not dependent on the right person noticing or the right programme being in place. He is already moving toward you.

Psalm 23 doesn't say the Lord was my shepherd. It says he is. Present tense. Right now, in whatever position you are in.

My father jumped a fence for a sheep that wasn't his. The Great Shepherd laid down his life for sheep who had all gone their own way. If he did that, he will not leave you on your back in a paddock wondering if anyone is coming.

He is coming. He may already be there.

Let him tip you right.

Reflection:

Think about the last person who disappeared from your congregation without explanation.

When did someone last go looking?