He Ran Off on the Coldest Morning of the Year

It went to nine below on the twelfth of February and the gate at the bottom of the lane was open at six in the morning, and I have never established who opened it, though I have a working theory with four legs.

I want to be plain about something before I tell the rest, because I do not want this read as a story about a good man. It is nine below and there is a goat out. That is not a moral situation. That is a job.

I got dressed in the dark, which takes longer at fifty than it used to, and I went out in the truck along the lane and then on foot up the top side, because you cannot see into the ditch line from a vehicle.

He was not in the ditch. Bucky was in the corner of Ames's bottom field standing perfectly still with his back to the wind, and when I came up he looked at me the way he looks at everything, which is without any particular opinion.

Here is the part that is worth saying. I was not angry when I got there. I had been angry in the truck. I had said several things in the truck. And then you get out and you walk up the side of a field in that cold and by the time you get to the animal what you mostly are is relieved, and that is not a decision a man makes, it is just what is left when the cold has taken the rest of it off you.

We walked him back. It took forty minutes because a goat does not hurry for weather. Toby was up when we came in, which he should not have been, and he had put the kettle on, which he is not supposed to do either.

And he asked me, while I was getting my boots off, whether I had ever thought about not going.

I said no. That is the honest answer and it came out flat and quick, and I have thought since about how quick it came out, and I think that is the only part of this story worth writing down.

Two men, the same field, a different arrangement

Jesus draws a comparison that only works because everybody listening had seen both kinds of man.

I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth. (John 10:11, 12)

The difference is not skill and it is not kindness. It is stated exactly: whose own the sheep are not. The hired man may be perfectly competent. On a fine day you could not tell the two of them apart, and that is the point, because the weather is what does the telling.

So the question the passage asks is not whether somebody is nice to you. It is whether you are theirs.

You are somebody's own, and that word is doing all the work in John 10. The written word puts ownership at the center of the comparison rather than affection, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as belonging instead of as property.

And then He says the thing that settles it, twice, in case anybody missed it: I lay down my life for the sheep. Not I might. Not if it comes to it.

You have never been in a category that gets abandoned when the weather turns. John 10:11 makes the staying the definition rather than the achievement, and His Spirit is what makes a definition hold at six in the morning.

What He says about the ones He has

There is a second half of that chapter and it is where the comparison stops being about shepherds and starts being about a grip.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. (John 10:27, 28)

That is a sentence about a hand rather than about a sheep. Nothing in it depends on the animal's grip, its intelligence, or its record of staying inside fences.

I have a goat with a documented record on fences. There is no version of that record that recommends him.

You are held by a grip that does not slacken when yours does. John 10:28 puts the holding on the hand and not on the one being held, and the Spirit of God is what makes that the difference between reading a promise and sleeping on it.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes to a person who has been the trouble too many times, and it is not guilt exactly. It is a quiet expectation of being put down as a bad job, and it usually arrives with a number attached.

You have not been counted up and found not worth it. That is what John 10 says without a clause about frequency anywhere in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from theology into a house.