In the Davis Mountains region, there is an elusive animal that exemplifies something meaningful about the land it occupies.  In actuality, it may only be elusive to folks like me: a town-dweller confined to public lands and trails.  But this somehow enhances the metaphor.  They’re beautiful, powerful, well-armed, and striking to come upon.  As many times as I have traversed into the mountainous desert, I have only laid eyes on ONE. 

It was a dreary day in late spring last year.  Crystal (my wife) was still required to be at school while the kids were not.  I had been nursing an itch to get out of the pump-jack forest and into the wild and I impulsively declared it a hike day.  We left mid-morning in my big 90s conversion van, then converted into a rhino-lined apocalypse chariot, headed west down I-20, and turned south onto TX-118 towards the Nature Conservancy’s “Madera Canyon” property.  (*I recommend)

I mentioned the word “impulsively;” I hadn’t checked the weather, or maybe hadn’t believed the weather in my infinite optimism, or something along those lines.  I have a tendency to fast-forward through otherwise reasonable dissentions when I’m feeling compelled about one thing or another.  About a mile after the south turn onto TX-118 it started to rain…significantly.  The presence of adversity only dares my ego-self to keep going.  If you want to do something cool, you’re going to have to push through a challenge; ergo, this is a GREAT sign.  Right?

It wasn’t a great sign.

The kids had just about dozed off, which truncated any verbal reaction I was about to have.  As a parent, I’ve learned a weird skill to keep quiet even when something concerning is unfolding.  On the way back from Uvalde one thanksgiving, I once hit a deer AND THEN a wild pig even before I managed to get the car stopped from the first collision.  All while remaining as silent as a monk on a mission.            

I topped a hill only tall enough to conceal the road behind it and there, standing in the middle of that overwhelming desert highway, with Davis Mountain mesas for a backdrop, stood a desert big horn sheep much less surprised to see me than I was to see him.  I came nearly to a stop in the empty highway, and he took the opportunity to move incuriously across the blacktop from west to east. 

There’s an uncontrollability of wild animals that isn’t exactly frustrating; it’s more like… unfulfilling in the way that it leaves you wanting a more vivid, meaningful experience.  As silly as it is to say, I suppose I felt entitled to a brief chat with the Bighorn.   Having discovered his hiding-hole, I wanted to know more and more and more about his life, history, family, feeding habits, and I probably wanted him to congratulate me for his discovery and for my charmingly erudite curiosity.  But wild animals seem to be gone about as soon as you are able to acknowledge the moment.  Blip.

Bighorn Sheep, although believed to have crossed the Beringia land bridge, were “extirpated” from Texas by the early 1960s according to Sul Ross University in Alpine.  No worries, I googled it, “extirpated” means “to root out and destroy completely”; it’s used for when a species is “exterminated” but only from a certain region.  The sheep remained in other north American desert regions.  However, in 1969, 16 desert bighorn sheep were brought from Arizona and, as of 2020, as many as 1500 animals are estimated to exist in the area.

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Seven or eight years ago, a phrase popped into my head.  No joke… just dawned on me one day; I feel very little credit for it.  I’ve considered it a divine thing, a Holy Spirit thing, and even a lucky strike at different points.  But it has meant to me a great deal.  I’m not just blowing smoke; I’ve been thinking about it for the better part of a decade.

I have no cultural business talking about a “mantra”, but I have yet to find a western phrase that occupies the same lingual space.  A “mantra” is a repeated word or phrase that is built on the Sanskrit words for “to think” and “instrumentally.”  In this case, a mantra is something you tell yourself regularly that shapes your thoughts in a given situation.  

Enough of the staging, here it goes:

THE SHEEP ARE WHERE OTHER SHEPHERDS HAVE LEFT THEM.  

It’s just a simple way of reminding myself that the people in our lives have very rarely arrived at their current philosophical, intellectual, political location on their own.  We usually stand where we stand not because we “thought” or “reasoned” or “prayed” our way there, but because we’ve been brought to this place by people we trusted. 

Social media mania

In 2016 I was making a fruitless attempt to be vocal on social media.  We’ve all thought about it, or done it, at some point and we’ve all felt the slow-burn realization that hardly anyone cares.  There’s only two results: those that agree with you…continue to agree with you; those who disagree with you…argue or increase the coldness of their shoulders.  Maybe someone in the middle reads and thinks differently, but it’s rare that you’d ever know that. 

Anyhow, one post (that I found brilliant at the time) drew significant aggression from two people I grew up with.  They joined forces, started having a back-n-forth in the comment section, I moved the whole conversation to a private DM, included a characteristically self-deprecating apology, and assumed the clouds would part.  Nope.  The move to the DM enabled a heightened level of vitriol and ended up with the dismissal of my character as a person and a minister due to my lack of allegiance to their “dear leader.”  Eventually, a physical threat was mentioned upon my person and I deleted the thread. 

I don’t know how you would take this situation, but I handle these things thusly: by ruminating on them hourly until I’ve chewed it all the way clear-through to both of our graveside services.  My doctors and therapists agree that at least two of my…let’s say definable personality characteristics…include impulsivity control.  Thus, I kept going back to their social media looking for understanding, holes in their story, past dirt, assurance that they weren’t good people, or whatever works.  I’m not too picky.

Note: I’m not really on social media these days for this reason.  I keep the accounts for practicalities. I open the sites, look at the notifications, but I’m not allowed to scroll down.  I gave it up for lent 3 years ago and haven’t re”lent”ed. 

In one of my would-be adversaries’ posts, I learned something about them that eventually made my understanding-bell ring; it was long-past due.  This person was sharing a memory of their grandfather at some cosmically meaningful point in time like Facebook “grandparents’ day” or perhaps even a real anniversary.  The memory of their grandfather, that they selected to memorialize and characterize him, was of him asleep in his recliner in the den, with a specific mention of Fox News still blaring in the background.  Now, I knew this man extremely well.  It is also, ironically, a part of my own worldview that the kindly, conservative members of his generation would have NEVER stood for the immoral filth represented by the “dear leader.”  But that’s not important to this story.  Just sayin’.

Here’s what I realized: when I argue with them, I’m not arguing against reason and evidence, I’m arguing against the living memorial they maintain for their grandfather.  When I contradict someone’s worldview, I’m not contradicting a set of principles they’ve arrived at through experience and learning, I’m contradicting the voices of their past.  AND, most importantly, they TRUST those people.  That’s why it becomes a character issue so quickly in these situations.  The only real question being asked is whether they can trust me more than their previous shepherds. 

It’s even happens to Jesus

Watch this:  in John 4 Jesus has rested by a well outside of a town that Hebrews generally avoid because they consider the people to be racially and religiously impure.  He meets a woman who is the very definition of oppressed within her own culture.  She’s an outcast because five different men have likely used her and then used their power-advantage to divorce her.  Now she’s too much alone to even go to the public watering hole while other women are around.  Jesus offers her hope, water that lasts, a chance a real life, a shot at truth straight from the source.  She is either obstinate or confused, most likely a blend of both, and initially shows herself resistant to his attempts at compassion and enlightenment.  What I’m driving at is contained within her third retort of Jesus:

¹² Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” (John 4:12 NRSVUE). 

Did you see it?  Even when this woman’s culture has shoved her to the bottom and stepped on her face, she is still inclined to defend its position on the basis of the ancestral hero figure Jacob.  She has spent her whole life trusting the wisdom passed down to her through their shared lineage and those connections don’t unfurl easily.  She’s undoubtedly even leaning upon the cultural traditions that have enforced the edict calling for her ostracism.  She defends that which hurts her!  What’s most unsettling, she’s literally doing it in the face of almighty God himself. 

She’s asking the question that was really being asked during my internet kerfuffle and so many other modern conflicts: do you really think you know better than my previous shepherds?  Do you really think your way of life is better than my/our way of life?  Do you think you’re smarter than the person who taught me these precepts in the first place? 

“Are you greater?” …  She’s 100% shifting the conversation from reason towards character.  She’s now questioning Jesus’ innate goodness vs. Jacob’s innate goodness.  This is what happens when we argue.  Regrettably, your points are usually not validated by your logic, they’re validated by your character.  In these cases, they’re really validated by pitting your character versus the character of the person they previously believed.  If you learn to see people’s political discussions through this lens, you’ll be shocked by how many times arguments shift from “what’s happening” to “who’s doing it and what have they done previously.”  I’m no longer sure we’re even programmed to look for right answers.  I now wonder if, in reality, we’re just programmed to preserve and maintain existing relationships.

It’s not what it looks like

In our journey through this life and attempts to track down some truths, we will encounter innumerable people holding their ground in the “wrong place.”  I say that with all humility because their “wrongness” is not absolute; it may just feel like they’re in the wrong place because we’re on a different path than them.  Or…. they may legitimately be dead wrong because their previous shepherds were dead wrong, or shortsighted, or even outright malicious.  You and I must never forget that we are just as susceptible to standing in that spot as they are. 

Vulnerably I’ll tell you, my first tendency, when I encounter unwavering wrongness, is to assume a moral or intellectual deficiency on the part of the other party.  That’s not a pretty sentence and I can’t write it to look any better (I think it’s a millennial thing, but authenticity might be my very highest value; so there).  My indefensible knee-jerk reaction is to assume that someone’s either “too dumb”, “too stubborn”, “too unaccustomed to reading”, or even sometimes “too immoral” to come to a plain truth.  I’ve got to temper that if I want to continue to be a leader in this culture.  I’ve even got to temper that if I want to preserve my own health in fact. 

When we find a sheep in a weird spot, a bad spot, or even an immoral spot, may we remember one thing: another shepherd left them there. Like the proverbial turtle on a fence post, they didn’t get there on their own.

E-Shepherds

I like the internet.  I used to LOVE the internet.  Now it’s more of a “situationship.”  One of the many uncertainties between me and this new world could be explained by the new extreme availability of would-be shepherds.  People who have gained enough notoriety in their niche-interest fields and now have the ability to reach and reshape the minds of people thousands of miles away; people that you know in real life. 

You have no idea how much this affects my life as a church leader. 

A member has glowingly brought me a YouTube video from some guy who found “the prophecy that everyone else missed”.  When I can’t in good conscience, or biblical discipline, affirm this inflammatory message that’s mere click-bait, he leaves the church and takes up the hobby of telling people I’m satanic.

I met a guy in jail, helped get and keep him sober, and started to give him leadership in our twelve-step program.  He comes across some internet garbage stating that anyone who doesn’t use the King James Bible is under the influence of Satan (it comes up more than you’d think).  When I won’t acquiesce, he’s gone.   The guy who helped pull him out of the gutter doesn’t have as much trust as the prophets of the algorithm.

I love podcasts, listen to more than my share on my incessant West Texas driving just trying to see a doctor or a decent grocer.  But one guy started listening to a heavily reformed podcast at someone else’s recommendation and our relationship has never recovered from his realization that I’m not Calvinist.

One person that listened to AFR while at work questioned my, their pastor’s, faith after I didn’t participate in a Home Depot boycott the channel had called for.     

Finally, there’s a person I consider a friend and we have shared a handful of very meaningful experiences.  They withdrew themselves from some activities because I wouldn’t consent to flat-earth theories!  Some whack-job on the internet grossly perverted some Old Testament verses into looking like they supported a flat-earth mindset.  That shepherd was trusted at a higher level than this real-life shepherd. 

Ghosts of religions past

While the internet shepherds scatter the sheep to please the god of “like and subscribe” (make sure you click that bell…) some of the most powerful other-shepherds we face are beyond us in time and years.  Like my friend with their grandfather, these connections run deep and will likely never be severed.  Maybe augmented or reframed, but probably never cut entirely. 

All forms of Christianity have evolved over time.  I don’t believe this is a problem.  While we believe God never changes, humans understanding of God does without question.   There is much extensive writing on this subject that would be more helpful to explain but suffice it to say that the change in theology from the left side of the book to the right is profound.  Scripture begins not knowing God’s name or even about the existence of an afterlife and scripture ends with an Immanuel Messiah and a merging of a new heaven and a new earth.  Our understanding changes as we move forward in time and that’s not only good; it’s essential. 

However, it leaves artifacts.  Fossilized records of beliefs past that reasonably contradict the spirit winds and scriptural readings of today.  I assume that this last sentence even gave some of us the willies reading it.  I understand and I’m compassionate about it. 

Think of it this way: our Christianity is quite different than our grandmothers Christianity.  Her Christianity is very different than the Christianity from around the time of the American Revolution which is different still from the Christianity of Martin Luther and the reformers, different still from the Christianity of Thomas Aquinas, different still from the Christianity of Augustine of Hippo, and different still from the early church.  It’s a drastically moving target; and it’s not even a straight line, it’s more like a repeating circle.  Personally, I think it keeps changing by God’s design so that 1. we keep moving toward an ultimate revelation and 2. so that we don’t stop and worship the church itself as divine. But that’s another essay.  

These past shepherds take many forms and have many “rods and staffs” that linger in the mind of the people we meet.  Inside the church, we have past shepherds of the theological ilk; those who imbued us with our framework for thinking about God and creation.  Beliefs they clearly believed in with passion, and if we trusted them, we likely still trust those beliefs.  I have not the interest, nor the ability, to press this writing into a 1000-page discussion of shepherd-centered theological views.  Suffice it to say, in my years of church leadership, I’ve touched, and been touched by, dozens of such issues.  Examples may include:  once saved always saved, literal seven day creation, the rapture, leadership roles held by women, who wrote Hebrews, and even acceptable types and places of baptism.  Each of these represents a view of theology that has drastically changed, multiple times, even throughout some of our lifetimes.  Also, each of these represents a discussion, even affable ones, where a congregant noted that my words didn’t match the views of a previous shepherd they trusted.  In some cases, our relationship grew depth.  In other cases, points were taken away from me in their trust-point-system for being different than previous shepherds. 

Going back inside the church, the past-shepherd conflict often runs in other veins rather than theology.  It’s not uncommon for the personal habits, practices, and personality of a past shepherd to live on in the minds of people long after their respective exits.  If a previous shepherd dressed in a certain way, made phone calls at recurring times, attended committee meetings with a specific approach, or even espoused particular facial grooming standards … and someone placed their trust in them … then these principals live on and effect today.  We may never even hear them expressed, or we may get an earful.  But the people with whom we are attempting to live life are holding to these pastures; not because they necessarily chose to be, but because previous shepherds led them there. 

There’s even the likelihood that, at some point in our journey, we’ll fall victim to the past-shepherd loosely called landmarkism.  Broadly, this is when people identify a time in the past when “things were good”, build a metaphorical “landmark”, and try to keep as close to that paradigm as possible.  If you google landmarkism the first thing you’ll likely see is a nineteenth century Baptist movement to re-connect their churches with what they believed was the original truth of the apostles.  However, the Amish do it with the eighteenth century, many fundamentalist churches do it with the 1950s, and a number of today’s contemporary churches and individuals are even beginning to do it with the church-boom that took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

As time marches forward, particularly as time and life march forward into pastures of uncertainty, we humans can’t help but long for the now-idealized past.  “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt!”(Exodus 16:3 NRSVUE)  Wishing to go back, even if we know that it wasn’t perfect, is just part of who we are as a species.  Recognizing that many of our fellow sheep are still being guided by a past they loved, and most importantly trusted, may help us understand today’s behaviors and conflicts more compassionately.  

Shepherds of the polity

Setting aside the possibility of some deeper subconscious or psychological explanation, our clearest manifestation of other-shepherd conflicts in our time comes through politics.  There’s a question I keep asking myself regarding the present day religious-right; “when is enough going to be enough?”  I would have thought a hundred times over that the same people whose heart leaps at the chance to boycott Target, would long have been done with Donald Trump.  However, he’s still very much their “dear leader” despite filling up a bingo-card worth of inhuman rot.  Is there a reasonable explanation for this paradox?

Well…not really, or at least not a logical one.  You see, I believe that, for today’s conservatives, allegiance to the “dear leader” is firmly rooted in the shepherds of the past.  This can obviously look a number of different ways for different people.  For my acquaintance mentioned above, they could be pushed to even greater extremes than the current GOP has thus far, and they wouldn’t betray…not the GOP…but their grandfather. 

For someone else, the economic boom (albeit temporary) following the introduction of supply-side economics as well as the fall of the USSR, bewitched many a citizen into a long-term allegiance to Ronald Raegan.  He’s become a larger than life past-shepherd to many in a way that overshadows the unavoidable failures of “reagan-omics”, the long-term devastation his administration wrought to the middle class, and his own Alzheimer-driven intellectual difficulties while in power.  Many in today’s political climate wouldn’t dare vote against their party, just because of the admiration they felt for its past shepherds.  Even if today’s leaders are thoroughly putrefied. 

This is so felt in my little world.  If you were to get two committed party members from two opposing parties, they will often disagree with every statement the other makes whether they’ve thought it through or not.  It really does come down to cave-man language and thoughts:  “orange-man bad”  or “dems kill babies, take much taxes.”  The reason isn’t really a functional self-lobotomy, it’s the voice of a past political shepherd that they trusted.  And unfortunately for all of us, when we enter this stream of thought, changing our mind feels like betraying them.   In many ways, we would gladly make a huge consequential mistake than betray those sweet, sweet shepherds of politics past. 

Conclusion

So when (not if, when) we encounter sheep that are unabashedly and unwaveringly “out of safe pasture”, may we know well and good that a previous shepherd left them there; often a shepherd that doesn’t exist anymore.  May we maintain our compassion.  It won’t take much imagination to connect with the following disconcerting feeling:  

-You have trustingly followed a shepherd into a territory that they proclaimed as “green pasture” and it appeared to indeed be safe and good. 

-Inevitably, they disappear, a new shepherd arrives, and you are urged to “move on.” 

-The logical assumption is that you’d be headed for the dark valley or maybe even become a wolf-snack.  This leads you to question the new shepherd and their character thoroughly. 

This is the uncomfortable position everyone arrives at during various points of life.  You’ve felt it, I’ve felt, and we can all find a way to be compassionate if we identify this common, human experience. 

I STAND WHERE MY PREVIOUSLY TRUSTED SHEPERDS LEFT ME.

YOU STAND WHERE YOUR PREVIOUSLY TRUSTED SHEPHERDS LEFT YOU.

THE SHEEP ARE WHERE OTHER SHEPHERDS LEFT THEM.

May we trust the good shepherd and be compassionate with our fellow sheep.