Sheep Becomes the Shepherd

About six months ago, something shifted in me. I had been reading The Interior Castle by Saint Teresa of Ávila and the works of Saint John of the Cross, and without really planning it, I found myself drawn outside — out of the driveway, into the open air — to pray, to walk, and eventually just to sit. It pulled me away from the television, from the endless scroll, from wasting my evenings. Something in me believed I might find what Teresa wrote about — union with God in quiet — outside, under the stars.

It became a practice. Then a love.

Last night I came out under a full moon. I sat outside for several hours, prayed, and then simply listened.

About twenty minutes in, the Lord began to give me memories.

The first was of my childhood pastor, Brother Billy.

Fifteen or sixteen years ago, Brother Billy called me out of nowhere. I was in the middle of my prodigal years — far from God, far from the church — and the last person I wanted to hear from was the pastor who had known me as a child. I hadn't spoken to him in forty years. I was polite on the phone, but impatient. I wanted the call to end.

He kept calling.

He used my parents as an excuse — he and my father were old friends — but I think he was really checking on me, trying to find his way back into my life. I had actually babysat his firstborn child back in the 1960s. He was my father's age. And over time, he wore me down. I started to look forward to his calls. When I eventually came back to the Lord, those conversations became something I treasured.

Then something began to shift again.

Brother Billy was a retired pastor who had had a hard go of things — as many pastors do. He felt forgotten. He hadn't accumulated much in the way of worldly comfort. So I began sending him and his wife a nice gift every Christmas. But I could tell it meant the world to him. I don't think many people were remembering him that way in his old age.

That went on for about five years.

Then he began to decline. I could hear it in our phone calls — each conversation a little slower, a little more fragile, his memory slipping — until near the very end, when his daughter had to speak for him because he no longer could.

Here is what I saw last night, sitting in the moonlight:

When Brother Billy first called me, he was my shepherd. He had been my pastor since the 1960s, and even in my prodigal years he came looking for me. He was the shepherd and I was the one who needed finding.

But by the end — the last five years of his life — something had completely reversed. I had become the shepherd. I was the one calling, remembering, showing up, loving him toward the finish line.

The Lord gave me that whole arc in a single moment of quiet prayer.

And then I noticed where I was sitting on my property. I was facing the exact spot where I had taken that first frustrated phone call from him, fifteen years earlier. The spot where I had thought, I just have to get through this conversation.

And in that moment, Jesus said to me:

That was Me, through Brother Billy. And that was Me, through you, at the end.

That is what contemplative prayer has given me. Not escape from the world, but eyes to see what God has been doing in it all along — hidden in phone calls I didn't want to take, in Christmas gifts, in a shepherd who became a sheep and a sheep who became a shepherd.

Jesus was there the whole time. He never left the story.