Sheep

At the end of a busy day I am reflecting on a great day of worship and being with others who are pilgrims on the journey.

I have been reading through my own personal writings over the last ten years and looking back over my journey. It has been fun, exhilirating, disappointing, challenging, hilarious and honest. There have been times over the last ten years where I have written something that has become a recurrent pattern reflective of where I am on my journey.

While traveling through my own personal words I ran across a poem that I copied into my journal. The poem is by Billy Collins and is taken from The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems. He tells the story of reading a statement from an article on printing. "It has been calculated that each copy of the Gutenberg Bible requires the skins of 300 sheep."

Reading those words prompted the following poem entitled Flock...

I can see them squeeze into the holding pen

behind the stone building

Where the printing press is housed.

All of them squirming around

to find a little room

and looking so much alike,

It would be nearly impossible

to count them,

and there is no telling

Which one will carry the news

that the Lord is a shepherd

one of the few things they already knew.

page 35

I am thinking about Advent and this poem caused me to think about the Good News of the Gospel.

45 days until Christmas...