He Goes At The Speed Of The Slowest

There is a ewe in Nell's small flock with a bad off hind leg and the whole hill goes at her speed, and Nell has been thinking about that for about a month.

The vet says the leg is arthritic and there is nothing to be done and the animal is not in pain, only slow. She will get up the track. It takes her a long time.

Nell is seventy-four and has been going up that track since she was nine.

She used to do it in about twenty minutes. She now does it in something between forty and fifty, and the honest truth is that she does not entirely mind, because the ewe means she has a reason for the forty-five minutes that is not her own knees.

Her great-nephew Owain came up with her in the summer. He is twenty-two and fit and he set off the way twenty-two year olds do.

He was at the gate at the top in eleven minutes. He waited. He waited a good while.

And when Nell got up there with the flock and the slow ewe and the dog going backwards and forwards, he said, not unkindly, "You could get her up here quicker if you left her behind and came back for her."

Nell said: "That is not what this is."

She said afterwards that she thinks he genuinely did not understand, and why would he, because at twenty-two nobody has ever had to work out what a flock is.

A flock is not a collection of animals that happen to be going the same way. A flock has a shape. The shape of that shape is set by whoever is slowest, and the reason is not sentiment, it is that a flock which leaves its slowest is no longer a flock, it is a fast group with an animal on its own on a hill.

And Nell said the thing that this article exists for. She said: "The speed of the whole lot of us is her speed. That is not me being kind to her. That is what having a flock means."

You have probably assumed the other thing. That God is up at the gate, somewhere ahead, waiting, with a certain amount of patience which is being used up. That the flock has gone on and you are the animal on the hill. And nobody has told you where a shepherd actually walks.

The Verse Names Who Sets The Pace

There is a line at the end of the great comfort chapter in Isaiah that is usually quoted for its first half.

"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."Isaiah 40:11

Gently lead those that are with young.

A ewe in lamb is slow. That is the whole reason she is in the sentence. She cannot go at the pace of the flock, and the shepherd in this verse does not solve that by hurrying her or by leaving her.

He leads gently, which is a pace instruction, and the pace is set by her.

You are the reason the pace is what it is, rather than the problem with it. Isaiah 40 puts the slowest animal at the center of how the shepherd moves, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line from a comfort chapter and puts it down on a hill track behind a ewe with a bad leg.

And read the chapter it sits in, because context matters here. Isaiah 40 is written to people who were exhausted and who had concluded that God had stopped paying attention. The whole chapter is about strength and waiting and running and not fainting, and it lands on this: a shepherd going slowly on purpose.

You have not been left on a hill. That is what the written word says about how He moves with people who cannot go fast, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that arrive as company rather than as a verse somebody put on a card.

This Is Not A Concession Made To You

Now the part that matters, and it has to be said carefully because the wrong version of it is patronizing.

Going at the pace of the slowest is not the shepherd making an allowance. It is not him being nice about a shortfall. Nell was very clear about that and she is right.

If you have had to slow down, whether that is illness or age or caring for somebody or a stretch that took more out of you than you have got back yet, then the pace of your life has changed and everything in you wants to apologize for it.

And what Isaiah describes is not a shepherd tolerating a slow animal. It is a shepherd whose speed is defined by her. She is not holding up the flock. She is setting the flock's pace, which is a completely different sentence about the same walk up the same hill.

You are not being carried as an exception. It is written that He gathers the lambs in His arm and carries them, which is language about His ordinary practice rather than about a special case, and His Spirit is the one who walks at the back where the slow ones are.

And say the guard plainly. Nothing on this page asks anything of you. No pace, no output, no minimum, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere. If today you did almost nothing at all, you are exactly as much His at the bottom of the hill, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming another standard for somebody who is already going as fast as they can.