We must radiate God's love. We must know that we have been created for greater things, not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work.  We have been created in order to love  and to be loved.   Love does not measure. . . it just gives.   Mother Theresa

Chalet LAbri, April, 2004.

          In my reveries these days I have been recalling some of the places in my journeys where shepherds still tend their sheep as in the first century.  I have seen them in such diverse places as Kentucky, California, Montana, Turkey, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Ecuador, Peru, and Australia.  No doubt I now recall these scenes as I have been brooding over the parable of the Good Shepherd. In the story, Jesus sets the stage:  there is a sheepfold with a narrow gate, a fenced (more likely a low stone wall) pasture, within which is the sheep and a shepherd, keeping careful watch. He of course is that Shepherd. I dwell on that scene, picturing Him keeping watch on what is going on in our world, still in control with His Shepherds crook, working miracles.  The metaphor is so precisely true to life and so much on target that one cannot imagine an illustration more perfect.  How could it be otherwise, coming from the lips of Jesus?  Unlike the hired man who flees when he sees the wolf coming, the Good Shepherd remains steadfast to protect his sheep. Lo, I am with you always. What He offers is constancy.  These days what I find myself praying for most often is the constancy of His Presence, that I will feel His companionship and know Hes near, helping me make it through each day.  I need His assuring presence for these troubled times when so much that was once stable in my world seems under attack:  respect and reverence for the Ten Commandments, honesty,  caring agape love, and the whole catalog of values we knew in souls like Mother Theresa, Albert Schweitzer and George Washington Carver......

          Dwelling on these thoughts I am reminded that outdoors, jonquils, daffodils and forsythia now trumpet the arrival of spring.  Perhaps, yes of course it is no accident of nature that these spring blossoms are shaped like trumpets, sounding once more the glorious notes of Resurrection.  These, too, are reminders of His constancy.   Precisely on time since time began, they faithfully come forth out of their winter tombs.  Birdsongs fill my woods these mornings, too.  Some of these choristers are itinerants, headed north, but many others will stay until early September.  I hear their mating calls as they prepare to set up housekeeping and raise their young.  For all of this early spring symphonic introit to another blessed spring opera, the heart listens carefully and hears their lilting glorious chorus with one voice resound: 

       He is not here; for He is risen.

 

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young." - Sir Arthur Pinero