By my guest author, my dad. I ran across this poem he wrote that speaks to the heart in various seasons of life.
It is night.
The bats have left their caverns.
The moonless hills are filled with danger.
And Saul’s armies stalk the valleys.
The shepherd huddles in a cave.
A boy beside him weeps in fear.
There is loneliness
There is homesickness.
Agony, trial, and danger.
The night is dark, will morning come?
Will the shepherd hear the laughter
Of home, his brothers and sisters?
Or will the soldiers that hunt him
Rob his parents of this ‑ their son?
Across the hills other shepherds wait.
Their glowing fires defy the night.
Their laughter mocks pain, and fear, and danger.
But, here, the damp den in the mountain
Is devoid of merriment.
An angry stream pours by the cave.
Its waters are turbulent ‑ like the heart.
The cataract gushes through steep canyon walls
That form a valley of death in a night of despair.
Somewhere men rest in comfort.
But here a boy weeps in hunger.
A shepherd seeks courage for a single hour.
And a guard stares intently at the black maw of the valley.
You and I, the weeping boy, and the man who guards
Can see no hope in the loneliness,
In the homesickness,
In the agony and danger.
But another man,
Strengthened by trial is not defeated.
His lips move to pay homage
To the God who watches in the midst of danger.
“The LORD is my shepherd,” the hunted man says.
“I shall not want …”
And hunger knots his stomach
And fears stalk through the night.
But the words spring to his lips
While the faint light in the east promises dawn.
The sheep posed for this pastoral photo beside an irrigation ditch in Montana