Every once in a while, you read something that stops you in your tracks.
For me, recently, that “something” was a chapter in a book called While Shepherds Watch Their Flocks: Forty Daily Reflections on Biblical Leadership by Dr. Timothy S. Laniak. When I ordered this book, I didn’t know much about it, but after reading just the first chapter, I could tell it was going to help me be a more effective spiritual shepherd.
Dr. Laniak lived among shepherds in the Middle East for a while, to study both shepherds and sheep from a biblical perspective. Because the Bible consistently refers to the analogy of sheep and shepherds to teach spiritual truth, Dr. Laniak thought it would be helpful to study them and bring to typically clueless (to the skill of shepherding) Westerners insights that could help us in our relationship with God, the Good Shepherd, and others as we seek to shepherd them.
I’m now on day 14 of this 40-day journey, and I’m loving it. It’s helping me understand what it means to rest by still waters (Psalm 23) and to have a broken heart for scattered sheep (Matthew 9:36-38), as well as the significance of a staff to a shepherd and how that relates to spiritual leaders leading their own sheep.
Chapter 10, in particular, hit me hard.
The chapter begins with this simple, yet profound sentence: “There are about one billion sheep in the world, but each one matters to a shepherd somewhere.”
What struck me in particular was the number: one billion. There are one billion sheep in the world—and every single one matters to a shepherd somewhere.
He goes on to tell the story of Ahmed, a Bedouin shepherd he met who said: “Since 1984 I have never lost a sheep or goat that I didn’t find again, dead or alive—except one. And that one I can never forget. She is on my mind every night before I sleep.”
One lost sheep mattered to Ahmed. One lost sheep matters to Jesus. One lost sheep should matter to us.
There are one billion sheep in the world, and each one matters to a shepherd somewhere. There are one billion teenagers in the world, and each one matters to the Shepherd of our souls. And they should matter to us too.
That’s why one billion jumped out to me from the page of this powerful book. It made me think of the one billion teen “sheep” in the world, most of whom are lost. All of these lost teens must be found. We must deploy all our resources to reach every lost one and bring them into the fold.
