Ancient of Days

Jesus is our Good Shepherd. We, like sheep, are incapable of avoiding the world’ s dangers on our own; we are defenseless and reliant on the protection of our Savior for our survival against the wolves of this world. He alone guides our souls to a better life after death. On Earth, we are burdened with sin that weighs us down, gets in our eyes to obscure our vision, and grows from our very pores. We are totally depraved individuals in need of a good shearing. God, in His infinite wisdom and love, gave us His Lamb to be our Good Shepherd, to guide us in hope toward an opportunity to enter back into an intimate relationship with Him (Revelation 7:17). A “ good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, ” risking it all on behalf of their value to him (John 10:11). Jesus died on the Cross for all His “ sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34). Without the guidance of our Shepherd, we would be lost or even dead due to our unprotected and aimless wanderings.

Shepherds today are growing fewer and fewer as this ancient profession slowly fades away. Even so, we can still glean value from this metaphor and apply it to our own lives. We live in a world of thieves, wolves, and harsh elements—the perils of sheep. These dangers have come to do nothing but steal, kill, and destroy us. We encounter situations that make us lose hope, enemies that seek to bring about our downfall, and even Satan himself, who tries to steal our souls through idolatry and deviance from our journey toward God. We are still sheep today; we continue to wander aimlessly without a guide, indulging in the poisons that pass under our noses. We are hungry to fill the voids in our stomachs and can become impatient, grazing before we reach the green pastures and suffering the consequences. People in the past were stubborn to look up to the Good Shepherd and follow His way, and now is no different. We still think we will wander there on our own. We can ’t.

Just as much now as back then, we need to rely on our source of protection and guidance to keep us away from the physical, emotional, and spiritual dangers that we face. We need someone who can see the bigger picture, someone who doesn ’t have wool in his eyes, someone who has the capacity to take us to safe and bountiful spaces for us to grow and be safe. We need the Good Shepherd. We need Jesus. And guess what? He ’ s calling out for us, calling us by our names. We, as sheep in the flock, must “follow Him, for [we] know His voice ” (John 10:4). We need to answer the call and follow Jesus, returning “to the Shepherd and Overseer of [our] souls ” (1 Peter 2:25).

So whenever you find your heart bleating out for guidance or protection, turn your ears toward the Good Shepherd whose voice you recognize. Have faith, and trot your way toward green pastures and quiet waters to refresh your soul.

SARAH SHIN

Your first memory is his sticky hand. His fingers are so much smaller than yours, his smile so much gummier. On Saturday mornings after pancake breakfasts, the both of you sit in front of the living room television, him on your lap. He smells faintly of diapers and baby powder, and you have never been more enamored with milky teeth and staticky hair. Titus, you ask, what do you want to watch today? His lips form a circle, an exaggerated O, as he spreads his arms. Moon, he laughs. Titus always wants to see the moon, and lucky for you, you always want to see the moon too. So you grab the remote, flip through the listings, and settle on Interstellar, which you ’ ve already watched dozens of times. Before the mountains were born Or You gave birth to the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God. — Psalm 90:2 NASB

It should be boring, watching it again, but there ’ s the soft, warm weight of your baby sibling on your legs, there ’ s the swell

of orchestral rhapsodies in your eardrums, there ’ s the expansive, inexplicable mass of the solar system filling your retinas,

while you and Titus grip each other ’ s palms and slip through the untold black gaps between the stars.

You learn about the acronym

“SIDS” when Titus is almost a year old. His first birthday party is around the corner, and your mother has spent euphoric days at craft stores, collecting blue balloons, streamers, and paper plates for cake slices. There ’ s a baby monitor in his room every night, and before your father reads you your bedtime stories, you like to look through the fuzzy screen of the monitor and listen to Titus babble himself to sleep. Except on this warm summer night, his arms are tight against his sides, he ’ s turned onto his back, and his little face is bright in a slice of moonlight. It makes his features look icy, as if his eyes and lips and nose and eyelashes are frozen in time. Mom, you say, he looks like a little statue. She glances at the monitor, looks away, then turns back again. Your parents both sprint to his room, the fuzzy screen floods with light before your eyes, and Titus is on his back in his crib, always looking out the window, his gaze fixed on the pale, pockmarked moon.

In high school, you spend too many evenings looking up at the sky from the roof of your house. The feeling of your little brother on your lap on Saturday mornings has been fading away as the years pass, and even when you close your eyes and try to remember, all you see are the lights on the insides of your eyelids. Memories pick and choose which details to keep and which details to discard. You don ’t remember the shape of his smile, the sound of his voice, but you do remember the shape of his little coffin. When you were younger, it seemed unfair that people could die when they were asleep, like nothing even mattered, like they didn ’t even have to say goodbye, like they could just close their eyes and turn over and give up for no reason. But now, you wonder if Titus ’ obsession with space helped him to travel through the atmosphere, maybe swim through the silent seas on the moon ’ s surface. You wonder if he paused before he left the cushioned air of the earth, if he looked back at you before he stepped into that black hole.

You major in astrophysics. On the subway home after your last final exam of senior year, you sit next to a grizzled man with white hair poking past the edges of his ears. He has a weathered NASA baseball cap on his head, and his eyes are a dark, piercing black. He ’ s reading paperback Isaac Asimov with inky squiggles underlining sentences and dog-eared pages. So, you like space? you find yourself asking. He glances up, eyes grazing the backpack around your shoulders and the bags under your eyes. Student life during finals week: too little sleep, too much coffee, too much misplaced hair gel. You look like death, you ’ re well aware. And you probably smell something close to death too, judging by the way his brow furrows under his cap.

Like space? I live space. You find his reply interesting, yet vaguely elitist, like the kids who wear ties to class.

But then he continues, You know, I went to space.

You did? It seems unbelievable. But his eyes feel like they ’ re boring into your soul with their intensity. Your feet start

sweating in their sneakers.