He Puts It On His Shoulders And Is Glad

There are three versions of it, and in four years he has never once been asked for any of them.

He is doing the second coat on the fence, working the brush into the grain along the bottom rail, and the short version is running in his head the way it does when his hands are busy. The short version takes about a minute. It is fair to everybody, it names nobody, and he has polished it to the point where he could say it evenly. Under that is the long version, which is accurate, and which he would not say out loud in a room with people in it. And under both of them is the one that turns up at two in the morning, which is not a version of what happened at all. It is a version of him.

Four years. The heat has gone out of it. He can drive past the end of that road now and nothing happens in his chest, and he does not lie awake about the people, and if you asked him he would tell you honestly that he is not angry in the way he was. He still reads. He still prays in the truck. He is not out of anything.

What has not gone is the certainty about the first conversation. Whatever it looked like, however kind the face, it would begin with so what happened, and then he would have to open his mouth and produce the account. That is the thing standing in the doorway, and it is not the memory. It is the interview. And you know all of this from the inside, because you have your own three versions, and you have rehearsed them at the sink and in the shower and on the long drive, and nobody has ever asked you for a single one of them.

Count what is missing from the account

Jesus tells a story about this and He tells it to people who were complaining about the company He kept. It is very short. Read it slowly, because everything in it is in the verbs.

What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing.Luke 15:4-5

Leave. Go after. Find. Lay on his shoulders. Rejoice. Five verbs, and every one of them belongs to the shepherd.

Now do the harder reading, which is to count what is not in there. There is no question in that account. No interview, no explanation, no summary of events, no period of proving. The sheep does not speak one word in the entire story, and it is not asked to. And there is a second silence in it that most people go past: the story never says how the sheep got out there. Jesus does not tell us. He had no interest in telling us. Whether it wandered off after something green, or was driven out, or was crowded through a gap by animals bigger than it, or simply looked up one afternoon and could not see the flock anywhere, the account is silent, and so is the shepherd when he arrives.

I am going to be silent about it too. I am not going to ask you what happened in that building, and I am not going to try the case in either direction on this page. That is not modesty. It is that the story you have rehearsed for four years is not required at any point in the process of being found, and I am not going to be the first one to ask you for it.

You are one of God's people with no account rendered and none owing, and the version you have been polishing is not the entrance fee to anything. Luke 15 records five verbs and not one of them is a question, and the Holy Spirit is the one bringing that silence into a yard where you are painting a fence.

Then look at the carrying. He does not walk it home. He lays it on his shoulders, which tells you the state it was in when he got there, and tells you what he did about that state, which was to take the weight of it himself rather than to explain to the animal how it should manage the return trip.

You have a place that was never in question during any of these four years, and the one who came out for you did the carrying part as well. It is written that he lays it on his shoulders, and the Spirit who put that sentence in the record is the same one holding you up on days when you would not have walked it.

Rejoicing is the verb attached to the weight

Here is the word that undoes the interview, and it is the last one in the sentence.

Rejoicing. Not afterward, back at the fold, once the animal has been checked over and the flock has voted. It is a participle hung on the carrying, which means the gladness and the weight are happening in the same moment. He is glad while it is heavy. The sheep on his shoulders is not an inconvenience he is being gracious about. It is the reason for the mood.

Sit with that against what you have been expecting. You have been braced for the lecture, and behind the lecture the assessment, and behind the assessment the quiet permanent note against your name. What the text hands you instead is a man walking home under a load with his face doing something entirely different from what you have been rehearsing for.

And notice the phrase before it: until he find it. There is no clock in that sentence. Not for a season, not for a reasonable period, not until the animal has been gone long enough to have forfeited something. Until.

You were never removed from among God's people by anything that happened in one room, and no building on this earth was ever holding your place for you. Luke 15:5 has the shepherd glad while he carries, and the Holy Spirit is not editing that gladness down for your case.

Nothing in this is telling you to go back there. Nothing in it is telling you to stay away either, and nothing here sets you a date for deciding. That is not my business and it is not the point of the passage. The shepherd in the story does not hand the sheep a plan. He gets it on his shoulders and he goes home glad, and where the flock is standing next Tuesday is his concern rather than the animal's.

This is yours whether you ever walk through another door or not, and it is yours today, at whatever distance you are standing. Jesus told it that way on purpose and it was written down, and the same Spirit who moved the writing is telling it to you at this hour.