I started counting on the Wednesday, and I want to be honest about what that means, because the counting was the actual problem and not the goat.
Bucky got out twelve times between a Sunday and the following Saturday. Twelve. The fence was the same fence it had been the week before and the week before that, and something in him had simply decided that week was the week.
Sunday, twice. Monday, once, into the orchard. Tuesday, three times, which is a personal best. Wednesday is when I started keeping the count on the back of an envelope on the dresser, and Wednesday is when this stopped being about a goat.
Because once there is a number on a dresser, a man starts to feel something about the number. I would go out and get him and come back in and add a mark, and the mark would sit there, and I would look at the marks in the morning.
On the Friday I said something to Toby that I am not proud of. He asked whether we were going to get him, and I said, in a voice, that we would see. And that boy went and got his coat and stood by the door with it on and did not say anything else, and we went, and I have thought about that more than I have thought about the fence.
Saturday was the twelfth. I went out at about five in the afternoon and he was in the same place he had been on the Sunday, which is the gap by the elder, and I stood there and I looked at him for a while.
And then I came back in and I took the envelope off the dresser and I put it in the stove.
The fence got fixed properly the week after and he still gets out and it is fine. What I have not done since is keep a number.
The parable has a number in it and does not use it
Jesus tells this one twice in the gospels, and in Matthew He tells it to people arguing about who is greatest, which is the only time a number is relevant in the whole passage.
How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? (Matthew 18:12)
The hundred is mentioned because a hundred makes the point about proportion. And then the story completely ignores it. Nothing in the shepherd's behavior is affected by there being ninety nine perfectly good sheep on the hill behind him.
Goeth into the mountains. That is not a walk to the bottom of a lane. Matthew puts the difficulty in the sentence rather than leaving it implied.
You are being gone after by somebody who is not weighing you against the ninety nine. Matthew 18:12 raises a number and then declines to use it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as being valued rather than as being indulged.
There is a thing that happens to a person who starts counting their own failures, and it is worse than the failures. The count becomes a separate object. It sits on a dresser. It can be looked at in the morning, and it grows in a way the actual events do not.
You have not been assigned a total, and nowhere in this parable is one kept. The written word gives the shepherd one behavior and does not attach a threshold to it, and His Spirit is what makes an absent threshold something a person can rest in.
The line about the joy
The ending of the Matthew version does something the Luke version does too, and it is the part that undoes a tally completely.
And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray. (Matthew 18:13)
That is an outrageous sentence to anybody standing among the ninety nine, and it is meant to be. The joy is not proportional to the trouble caused. It runs the opposite way from every accounting system a person has ever built.
And then the last line closes the door on the idea that any of this is reluctant: even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.
You are somebody whose coming back produces more gladness than your never having gone. Matthew 18:13 says it in a comparison that makes no economic sense at all, and the Spirit of God is what makes an uneconomic sentence land in a body.
There is a hard version of this for anybody who has been the one going out. The tally does not only damage the one being counted. It damages the one counting, and it does it quietly, and the first casualty is the tone of voice.
You have not been listened to in a voice, and God has not once used one on anybody. That is what Matthew 18:14 does rather than what people do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves it from a story about sheep into a man's own kitchen.
So here is what a man learns standing at a gap by an elder tree on the twelfth time in one week.
You are not a running total, and the parable in Matthew 18 raises a number specifically in order to not use it. The Holy Spirit is what keeps that from being a clever observation and makes it the thing that gets an envelope off a dresser.
The counting was mine. Nobody asked me for it. There is no version of that week where the number on the back of that envelope helped one animal, one fence, or one nine year old standing by a door with his coat already on.
You have been gone after twelve times with the same face on the twelfth as on the first. Matthew 18:13 puts more joy on the found one than on the ninety nine that stayed put, and His Spirit is what makes that read as welcome rather than as unfairness.
And this is for the person doing the reading out loud, who is keeping a count on somebody or on themselves and knows exactly where it is written down. You were never asked to hold that record, and it has never once been the record He is reading from. Matthew 18 says it is not the will of the Father that one should perish, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that a thing a tired person can put in a stove.
Declare this over yourself
Say it out loud. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak over a tally is genuinely yours, delegated and never invented. God tells a parable with a hundred in it and then refuses to do the arithmetic, so speak to the count: you have standing to address it because He is the one who declined to keep it. An ambassador carries the King's word and never his own policy, so say what God has said and leave the outcome to Him. Every line below is Matthew 18:12 and Matthew 18:13 handed back in your own voice, and it is His Spirit, not your volume, that makes saying it a receiving.
- Tally I have been keeping on myself, you are not a record God is reading from. The Word of God puts a hundred sheep in the story and then never once uses the number to decide anything.
- Number on the back of an envelope, you are finished in the name of Jesus. I am sought and I am welcome, because Matthew 18:13 says there is more joy over the one that came back than over the ninety nine that stayed.
- Father, You have never once gone out after me with a different face than the first time. I receive that today, and I thank You that Your word says it is not Your will that one of these little ones should perish, and You said it without attaching a limit.
Matthew 18:12
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