The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. – Psalm 23:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (December 8, 2012): Psalm 23

I remember the day that I started to make the move from my cartoons to movies and dramas. I am not sure how old I was, but I loved my cartoons. I was an avid watcher of the old Spiderman show – the one that seems to endlessly repeat the same scene over and over again, no matter where Spiderman was going he seemed to have to swing by the same building about five times. And as a kid I noticed that, but it just did not matter to me, because in the midst of the repeated scenes I found a story, and it was a story that I wanted to hear. I loved Scooby-Doo and Shaggy and the gang chasing down the ghosts, which often were not really ghosts, but just someone trying to trick the gang – but at the same time the ghosts were never totally discounted. But what got me was always the same thing – it was the suspense and the danger and the challenge that the story that was being presented that I found attractive.

But one day I was sick and because I was sick I stayed home from school. Wrapped up in blankets and suffering from a fever I was placed in the living room of the house so that I could be closer to mom, and I decided to watch some television. It was early afternoon and there were no cartoons on T.V. (at the time I think we only received three channels) and so I turned on the afternoon movie. I did not hold out much hope for the movie, but on that afternoon I discovered that all of the things that I treasured about my cartoons was also found in movies that were not cartoons – and my world got just a little bigger.

Psalm 23 is one of the earliest (maybe the earliest) of the writings of David. It is written by the shepherd boy and he is trying to describe his relationship with God, and the world that he knows the best is the world of the shepherd. He understands the way that he relates with the sheep, and he imagines that that is the same way that God relates to him. That God leads and protects him the same way that he leads and protects his sheep. But there is an important fact about the way that a shepherd provides for his sheep that I think we sometimes miss. The shepherd does not feed the sheep from his hand; he moves them, always presenting the sheep with a challenge but also with the opportunity to find food.

We are like sheep. And to feed we need to be presented with a challenge. I think we often pray for a life that is without challenge, but we have not been created for that kind of a life – and our shepherd knows that. David seemed to understand something at a young age that we still struggle with – that the prayer that God would give us our daily bread, prayed to the God who is at heart our shepherd - is really praying that God would present us with a challenge out of which we can be fed.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: 1 Samuel 16