Sheepsicle

For the past two weeks we've been talking about discipleship and what it means to follow Jesus. We've been looking at Jesus references to himself as a good shepard and to us as sheep. We spent a lot of time looking at what a good shepard would do versus a bad shepard. My friend (we'll refer to him as Mr. Inappropriate ) is a vet and used to raise sheep, so he joined us last week to talk about sheep and shepherding.

Mr. Inappropriate explained how when sheep have babies, if they have more than one the mother will often time reject the other babies and in the winter time they often die. He told the story of how one night he got a call from his wife to find that one of their sheep had had a couple lambs and the Mom had rejected one of them. Mr. Inappropriate told his wife to euthanize one of them by hitting it on the head quickly, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. When he got home that night he found that his wife had euthanize the sheep, but had done it by drowning it in a bucket. Being winter time, the water in the bucket froze with two lamb legs sticking out of the top - hence the sheepsicle. I used this story as an example of how Jesus would drown you if you were bad. I'm kidding. As you can imagine, Mr. Inappropriate was an example of the bad shepard.

I decided to make my own sheepsicle and bring it in for the kids as part two of the conversation on the good shepard. Today we looked at Matthew 25 where Jesus talks about separating the sheep from the goats. We looked at the characteristics of the two types of people described, and what it looks like in our worlds to take care of the overlooked and ignored and how in some mysterious way, everytime we do something for them, we are doing it for Jesus. We talked about who the overlooked and ignored are in our schools and community. We're going next week to the old-folks-home in town and putting on a church service followed by an ice cream social for them.