I will place shepherds over them who will tend them, and they will no longer be afraid or terrified. - Jeremiah 23:4
I’m considering this one sentence I came across in a daily reading, not because I want to explain the context or the role this sentence plays. I didn’t get that far. No, what caught my eye was the assumption that makes the sentence understandable. Here it is: There is something about the presence of a shepherd that leads to calm sheep.
We all know the feeling of needing a break, even if we all know it differently. For some of us it comes on like small, almost muscular failings, like when that last pushup or curl or lunge was really the last you had in you and on the next attempt the body responds with a nonnegotiable “no.”
For others the need shows up more like a warning light — early and easy to ignore at first. It feels negotiable. And it is, for a while. But that little light rarely shuts off on its own. It keeps flickering in the background, asking for a change in pace. It’s not the body’s firm “no,” just the mind’s quieter “sooner or later.”
The mind has its own form of fatigue, a drain that comes from constantly doing one of the many things it does without us ever asking. I’m talking about the monitoring, the work of deciding, tracking, predicting. If you’ve ever travelled to an unknown place, relying on a paper map, you’ve acted out in real world scale the internal mental map reading your mind sees as core to its job description.
When this map reading work is what you need a break from, you don’t crash; you simply reach that point where the next mental rep doesn’t fire. And sometimes what it longs for isn’t sleep or escape, but a moment when something outside you reads the map, and sets the rhythm for a while. I’m describing a kind of entrainment — the relief that comes when our mind can sync to an external pace without having to producing it.
This enjoyment of entrainment is part of what makes a good show, at least a certain type of show, relaxing. We are led by the director. Our focus, our anticipation, is almost handed to us. The closeups mean we don’t even have to make decisions about eye gaze. We know where to look, one place, the screen. And the whole journey comes rolling toward us without hard decisions, without forks in the road that force a decision.
And this is where the shepherd image earns its place. The sheep can rest not only because the shepherd keeps danger away, but because the shepherd carries the burden of orientation. They don’t have to scan every horizon or hold the whole landscape in mind. The map gets simpler. The choices get fewer. They can just follow for a while. And we have our own ways of doing that too — small patterns that let life run on rails for a moment. Rituals, even the simple ones, give us that same relief: something outside us sets the pace, and we don’t have to navigate.
In this break, the one I want to portray, you get to just follow, not lead, not judge, not discern. That’s part of why we lean on rituals — the everyday kind and the sacred kind. They narrow the map, remove novelty, and spare us from inventing the rhythm ourselves.
And this is why, in certain seasons, it’s worth giving yourself permission to follow a liturgy word for word. Don’t think of it as performance. And it isn’t some shortcut to meaning. It is but a way to let something older than your own inner pace take the lead for a while. You don’t have to generate the next move. The sequence is already set. You simply step into it, line by line. The structure hands it to you and you’re no longer the one steering. You are being shepherded.