Setting: It’s mid-afternoon, the heat is hot and I’m running down the road in Riva’s Nicaragua.
I was 8 minutes in, running uphill and working up quite the sweat. Not exactly at my prime. I look to my right and I see this beautiful sheep tied to a tree and I think to myself “my, what a pretty sheep. Perhaps I shall take a picture of him on my way home”.
Fast forward to my way home.
I’m pushing myself to make it to the pretty sheep so that I can walk for a few seconds and snag a pic of the little fella (realistically just an excuse to catch my breath). I crest the top of the hill, looking down and to my left I spy my darling sheep.
Only he isn’t tied to the tree anymore. No.
He’s in the hands of a man and just as my focus sharpens, the man sharply crank his arms, snapping the neck of the sheep.
Yep. You read it right.
I stop dead in my tracks and gawk (literally) as the man ties a rope around the sheep’s neck and drags it to the back of his truck. Fighting back the rising vomit in my mouth I sprint down the hill, mortified.
A few minutes later a man passes me on his bicycle and gives me a good, solid stare-down on his way by. Classic.
For the next several minutes he looks back at me every 15 or 20 seconds. In my head I’m thinking “alright creep. I get it. Yes, I’m white. And no, I’m not blind, I can see you staring at me”. After the 7th or 8th time he turns back to look at me I too, turn around. And there beside me is my pal Gabriel, biking just at my heels. I pull out my headphones and squeak out a pathetically sweaty, “¡Hola Gabriel! ¿Como estas?”
In that moment I realize that the man biking in front of me wasn’t creeping on me. Not at all. He saw Gabriel following me a little too closely and was checking in on me.
He had his eye out for me, not on me.
In the book of John Jesus asks Peter, “do you love me?” to which Peter responds “of course I love you Jesus, you silly goon”. Jesus then tells him, simply, “feed my sheep“. * ok ok, this may not be an exact quote*
They go through this conversation a whole of 3 times, the final statement from Jesus all 3 times being, “then feed my sheep”.
His sheep are His children and every person on this earth is a child of God. Like Peter, I am called to feed Jesus’ sheep. In fact we are all called to feed his sheep.
I’ve known this before I was able to spell my own name (granted my name is a little tricky, thanks Mom) yet I failed to do it.
That day, while running in Nicaragua, I didn’t feed His sheep. I slaughtered His sheep like the man on the hill.
I sheepishly (haha) ran the rest of the way home thinking to myself, “Marita, that was not Gucci, not Gucci at all”.
