All of my inboxes have been sheepish for the past three months! I never truly thought about the saturating presence of sheep in our western culture until we studied about sheep and shepherds and wool and wolves for a few weeks in our Digging Deep study. But you found, made, wore and decorated your study rooms with sheep intensely there for a few weeks. Best of all, you learned from the Good Shepherd, Jesus the Christ, the Messiah. He is the anointed sacrificial lamb. While we had no other recourse, but to cry as sheep that are bleating to Him for rescue, He became one of us so that He could become that bleeding Lamb. That’s the over-arching lesson from the past couple of months.
Here are the two latest (and some of the sweetest) DIggers’ lamb creations that have come my way. One is a table decoration at Little Mountain church in Winchester, Tennessee. The other is an ornament that I get to hang on my tree. It’s from Tracy Jeter, of the Noah church, in Manchester, Tennessee. (All those “chester” places are good with the sheep!)
Don’t forget you have two more days to get your submissions in to the contest! Winner will receive the entire HOPE bundle for teaching children the Word. A $60.00 holiday value, it includes a study guide for parents, a set of sturdy character flash cards, a timeline for putting the Bible characters in their historic perspective, a set of character trait flash cards for real life application and a memory game using the characters. It can literally fill up your kids’ or grandkids Bible time year in 2024.
You can get all the contest info here:https://thecolleyhouse.org/its-christmas-contest-time
(If you can’;t get your video to upload The Colley House Facebook page, just send it to my personal Facebook Messages or to byhcontest@gmail.com)
Enjoy the holidays. If you are hurting, as so many I know are this season, you may not enjoy, but you will faithfully serve. While we do not have any Biblical authority to claim we know the date of Christ’s birth or to celebrate it as a spiritual holiday, isn’t it nice when more people are focusing on the Lord? Let’s you and me remember the birth, life, death and teachings of the anointed one, the Messiah, every day of every year!
Last weekend, while in Middle Tennessee at a Keepers at Home Retreat, some of the ladies were outside studying the second month of Digging Deep “The Crown,” when they heard the bleating of sheep. Our study this month is from Psalm 23 and is about the Shepherd and his sheep. A few hours later, I found myself knocking on the door of the shepherd to ask him if the diggers at this retreat could come see his sheep.
He was a very nice gentleman whose wife has been through a very dark battle with cancer. He was extremely open and and answered all of our questions about the sheep as he patiently led us through the gate to the barnyard and pasture that was indeed his sheepfold. He had five lambs that were born only the day before. 
As the dog led them toward the shepherd and the barn, they followed. But the dog stopped short of bringing the flock past our little group. We stood in the gap between the calling shepherd and the flock. They were not coming to eat until the “threatening intruders” were outside the fence.
There were obvious ways we could tell this: the immediate response of the sheep to his voice, the medical attention that was evident on one of the sheep that had been partially sheared to remove pests, the cleanliness and proper ID tagging of the animals, the neatness of the barn and pasture. Is our Shepherd interested in our spiritual health and purity?