I recently had a short break in North Wales with members of my extended family. The party included my cousin and his 2 small children aged 6 and 3 years. Our view from the farmhouse we were staying in included sheep and their lambs. We set out to drive in convoy from our remote farmhouse to Betws y Coed, as there were 6 of us in total. As we drove over the bleak, wet and windy moorland tops we came across a mother, near the roadside, who had clearly just given birth to a lamb as she was licking the amniotic sac from her offspring who looked somewhat dazed at it’s emergence on a windswept moorland. No comfortable hospital bed or birthing pool for this mother, no cosy cot for this new life. We stopped the car and hopped out, briefly, to point out the newborn lamb to the 2 excited children.
We asked our host who was a retired sheep farmer whether all the sheep give birth out on the moors or whether they are brought in to the relative warmth of lambing sheds. Apparently, it depends on the breed of sheep, Welsh sheep being particularly hardy.
I was reminded of the bible passage in John’s gospel, where Jesus tells his listeners that he is the Good Shepherd (John 10:11-18) – the one who knows all his sheep, and whose sheep know him. The One who will lay down his life for his sheep.
That new mother stood guard over her newborn lamb, despite the cold, the rain and the wind; and that lamb immediately bonded with its mother. (We didn’t spend long at the roadside in order to avid stressing the mother and her lamb).
On one of our walks from the farmhouse we stopped to look at a field full of sheep and lambs. Each lamb had a number painted on to its coat and the same number on the mother. This was obviously to help the farmer /shepherd and not the mother!
Jesus is our Good Shepherd. He knows each of us by name, without the need of identifying markers, and we can know him, the One who protects us and who lay down his life for each one of us.