The Garden Dance
July 2, 2025
The Shepherd's Voice
I’ve been sitting on this story for about a decade, but it keeps resurfacing and remerging, like a stick that disappears only to be brought back up by the current of life. I can sense that current shifting, the course of this gentle ebb and flow giving way to the Great turner of the tide and Calmer of the storm. Gently, I follow His hand, I remember His voice and the gentle call of His presence. A nudge to remember, to savor and to seek all Who God has been and Who He will be, because I know the goodness of His voice.
This story begins when I am seven years old.
I have curly blonde hair, I’m wearing jean shorts and sneakers, and I have a gap-toothed grin.
My dad is driving down the driveway with a rusty, white trailer. I know what’s inside and I stand on my toes as he rounds the bend. He has my sheep. My very own sheep. A single ewe and her two lambs come reluctantly out of the trailer. The ewe has a black face and wooly body and bleats to her lamb’s nervously as she nuzzles them close.
“It’s okay mama, we’re not going to hurt you.”
Sheep aren’t like cattle, who you must prod and chase into obedience. Sheep need to be gathered, and they scatter if they’re frightened. They fight you until they’re caught securely and then they go limp, submissive in your arms. I bend down, getting eye-level with the mama. I notice her eyes, wide with fear and yet strikingly beautiful, like a canyon surrounded in a lake of green.
I reach my hand out, try to touch her nose, but she jerks it back.
“It’s okay, mama.” My voice is quiet, soothing, but there is no response; she doesn’t know me. Not yet.
I’m not sure what it is about sheep, but they innately brought out the nurturer in me; the need to be gentle.
Every day, I’m back in the pasture, drawn to these helpless creatures. They came to me with scabies (a skin disease caused by mites) and needed medical attention daily, but I don’t remember minding because I thought they’d learn to trust me; learn to trust that I only wanted what was best for them, even when it hurt. I named the mama “Ginger” and the lambs “Sunny” and “Cole,” and talked to them like they knew their names. Each day that passed, trust grew. Eventually, I could walk up and put my arms around their necks, and they would continue to stand there, chewing their cud contentedly.
While my sister raised milk-cows, sheep became my thing and my little flock grew. Each one had a name, and I was at nearly every one of their births. I’d sell the males for meat and keep the lambs, taking one to show and sell at 4-H each year. Lambing season was my favorite time of year, as I spent hours in the barn assisting with births. The ewes didn’t always have an easy delivery but would often need help. Eventually I learned to pull lambs and feel for their position in the birth canal (whether breech or nose forward). Being with a ewe while she’s giving birth is a magical experience, as her grunting and straining brings forth a lamb, then another, oftentimes another and even on a few occasions, a fourth. When one ewe couldn’t handle the extra lambs, I’d have bum lambs that would need to be bottle fed throughout the day and night. These sheep knew me, and I knew them. When walking into the barn in the darkness of night while checking for ewes lambing, I could even tell which sheep was which by the sound of her bleat. Some were annoying and loud (like the older ewes) and others were softer, more murmurs.
When I was approaching my senior year in High School I had around 30 ewes in all. Each with a name and a personality. Ginger had passed, but I still had Sunny, and she was as strong a brute and a great lamber. Then there was Annie who got out of every fence we put her in, only to immediately want back in with the others. I also had Joy (one of Ginger’s lambs) who was born prematurely and the only surviving lamb of her two siblings. Then there was Victoria and Cookie’s & Cream and Charity, to name a few.
Even a decade later, I can still see their faces and their distinctive markings. All 30 of them.
But we were moving.
We were moving across the country from Montana to Kentucky and my sheep would not be making the trip. Since they were a wool-breed and were used to a cooler climate, we didn’t think they’d fair well. The expense to transport them would also be extensive, so the decision was reached that they would be sold.
One of the saddest days of my life was the day that a stranger came with a stock trailer, handed me a check and drove my flock away. I told the cold woman their names, but I knew she didn’t care. I stood in the driveway and cried into the cloud of dust, remembering my seven-year-old self and the day I got my first ewe and lambs.
Then a few months later, my family and I took a road trip to attend my cousins wedding shower in a different part of the state (a few hours away). We were packing up to move and yet the sadness over selling my sheep hung like a melancholy blanket over the excitement.
As I sat in the backseat of my grandmother’s suburban and we spend down the freeway, my eyes were glued to the landscape of lush greens and rolling hills. After hours of taking in so many foreign sights, my eye caught something familiar; something I knew intimately.
I saw my sheep.
I just knew it.
“Grandma, those are my sheep!” I called, gripping the headrest in front of me and pointing out the window.
“Liv, they can’t be, we’re hours from home!”
“No, I really think they are!”
On the way home, I convinced them to stop at the place I remembered them being, in the middle of nowhere, someplace in Montana. Between the semis flying past, I ran across the freeway and down the embankment to the fence of the pasture.
There were fifty or so sheep and a few lamas (to ward of predators) dotting the landscape. Every head turned in my direction, alert and rigid.
I put my hands to my mouth and called, the call I had used since I was a child. The call Ginger knew and her lambs after that.
“Here, sheep, sheep, sheeeep.”
Without a moment of hesitation, all thirty of my sheep came running towards the fence, while the others stood and stared.
They knew me.
They were my sheep, and they knew my voice.
With tears streaming down my face, I scratched them all one last time, calling each one by name. I look behind me and saw that my mom was crying too. The semi’s continued to thunder past and I couldn’t help but feel I was standing on holy ground, learning an ancient truth, woven into the fabric of my very being.
I am God’s.
I am the sheep of His pasture.
I know His voice.
A stranger’s voice I will not follow.
That voice calls to me, it calls to you, can you hear it? Have you spent time with the Shepherd of your soul? He’s the One who knows the sound of our cries, holds our tears and leads us beside the still waters, even when we don’t recognize His hand. No special skill is needed if we're His follower, as we’re all designed with the innate ability to hear and respond to the voice of the Shepherd, as we all, are the sheep of His pasture.
