Living Inside the Parable of The Good Shepherd

A Reflection by Alyssa Pasternak-Post

It’s a cold winter morning. Wind chill in the single digits, and actual temperature barely warmer. Nevertheless, my daughters and I eagerly bundle up and head to the barn to meet the new lambs still wet from birth and to check on the crowd pen of mama ewes and lambs born earlier this month.

“There are times in the lives of families when there is a need to re-center,” writes Jerome Berryman in Stories of God at Home. “We need to pause and ask what is really important and how God’s nature is making itself known in our lives.” One way to recenter is to “enter into The Parable of the Good Shepherd,” which “gives us a little more room for living when life is almost squeezed out of us.”

Rather than simply “entering in,” my family took living inside the story of the Good Shepherd literally last summer when we moved into an old farmhouse rental on a property that raises sheep. Our move came after a difficult time for our family, which had us sifting through important questions and needing to regain our balance.

One day after finally getting our daughters back into in-person schooling and my husband off to work, I sat in the meadow under the willow trees. On that perfect late-summer morning, my eyes were opened. It was all there, the whole story, all that we needed. The good, green grass. The cool waters of the creek. Being shown way through a challenging time - a place of danger, as the script says - that our souls might be restored.

Unbeknownst to us, the Good Shepherd had walked ahead of us in order to show us the way to this little farm. Because my family’s spirituality has been shaped by Godly Play’s method of handing on the Christian language system for nearly a decade, and by Psalm 23 itself, all that I needed to say to my family was, Look, here we are, living inside the story of the Good Shepherd. And they understood, in that deep knowing kind of way.

On Sunday I shared the Parable of the Good Shepherd with our new parish’s Godly Play circle. It was my first time sharing the Good Shepherd since moving to the farm. I’ve learned so much about sheep in the past months, their personalities, their generational ordering, the signs of labor, the deep guttural bleat of a mama ewe uniquely calling to her lambs. And I have learned even more of the faithful nature of the Good Shepherd, who likewise speaks to us in ways that we each can understand, providing nourishment, protection and companionship along the journey.

I wonder if you have ever come close to a place such as this?

The Rev. Alyssa Pasternak-Post serves as Associate Rector of St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church in York, PA and is a transitional deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Central Pennsylvania. She has been a Godly Play practitioner for nearly a decade.