God's Great Shepherding at Christmas
Shepherding was a common and profitable business during Bible times. The scriptural authors naturally made the connection between what it means to shepherd a flock of sheep, and what it means for God to shepherd His people. Isaiah uses the analogy of God shepherding each of us when he writes, “He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young” (Isa 40:11).
Isn’t that what we all are needing and wanting? To be consistently and nourishingly fed, to be gathered in arms larger than ours, to be carried in times of fatigue and weariness, to be led rightly as we lead our children and others around us in our daily life? It’s only natural to turn to God, Soul, for our sustenance, comfort, support, and guidance. In fact, it’s divinely natural!
We’re not just talking about or seeking these things materially, but first and foremost spiritually. To be spiritually sustained, comforted, supported, and guided is to be the very child of God, good. It is to see and feel the great infinite Love embracing ourselves, and the whole world in His infinite care. It is to recognize that we’re not mere mortals seeking something higher and better, but rather in reality, we are an idea of God, good, divinely shepherded, divinely led. Every right idea we receive from divine Love guides us and shepherds us. The divine message from God to man, the Christ within us, echoes down the centuries the sublime spiritual fact that God and man are one, and that God sustains man in perfection.
Isn’t this what the Christmas message brings to us each year? A recollection of God’s great love for all creation and for His creation – man? Allow the Christmas message to bring a renewed awareness of God’s great shepherding, keeping His flock protected and whole, into your life.
This renewal is an opportunity to awaken more and more to man’s innate perfection, divine guidance, and God’s great love for all. Each day we are being shepherded by the great divine Shepherd, God, and Christmastime reminds us of this divine providence, power, and activity.
So, as we pray to be the man God created, let’s allow the divine Shepherd to usher and guide each thought, each act, each moment. Then, like the shepherds in the fields of biblical day we will, too, receive “good tidings of great joy” (Luke 2:10). We will be given and willingly accept the great gift from God, good, Christ, Truth.
Mary Baker Eddy writes, “As the Wisemen grew in the understanding of Christ, the spiritual idea, it grew in favor with them. Thus it will continue, as it shall become understood, until man be found in the actual likeness of his Maker. Their highest human concept of the man Jesus, that portrayed him as the only Son of God, the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and Truth, will become so magnified to human sense, by means of the lens of Science, as to reveal man collectively, as individually, to be the son of God” (Mis 164:20).
