“God’s Tender Care”
7 For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
10 For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.” (Psalm 95:7-11)
Years ago, my brother had a ranch. I asked him if he ever considered raising sheep. His reply was swift and direct. “No! I don’t want to be a babysitter.”
My brother often overstated things, but in this case he was probably spot on. Sheep require a lot of care and attention.
One of the most common metaphors in the Bible for God’s people is sheep. This is true in the Old Testament and in the New. My “3-Minute Retreat” from Loyola Publishing used vs. 7 of this psalm as the basis for today’s meditation. This retreat was titled, “God’s Well-tended Flock.”
Most of the time these days, I do indeed feel “well-tended” by the Almighty, who is also the All-Tender. In spite of the covid-19 plague, in spite of a fairly serious blood clot (which is much better now), in spite of everything, I can honestly say that God has been and remains so good to me. I have everything I need and then some!
But even in what are, for me, good times, I have a difficult time listening to God. Why? Verse 8 answers the question: hardness of heart. Hardening of the heart is a perennial danger for me. There is always the possibility of a gradual hardening, of course. But frankly, I can also harden my heart in a hurry when I have a mind to do so.
And when I do that, God’s tender tending tends to become a lot firmer. This is what the Bible refers to as “discipline.”
How to keep a tender heart toward God’s tending of us is the problem. But what is the solution?
I don’t know that I have one, but I do have a couple of suspicions. Suspicions are not solutions, but they can sometimes lead to solutions.
I’ve noticed that when I meditate on God’stenderness and God’s works, my own heart becomes a little more tender. If I spent more time marinating in God’s tenderness, I might become more tenderized myself. (Such marinating would likely improve my taste as well.)
Another way of keeping a tender heart toward God is by being grateful. I am continually looking for things for which to give thanks. And usually, what I look for, I eventually find.
If I am not feeling well-tended and spiritually fed, I probably need to examine myself. If I am not experiencing the goodness of God, it may be that something is messing with my spiritual metabolism. Probably, it is I who am messing with my own metabolism.
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