if/THEN

"If" the Lord is your Shepherd

Maybe the most famous passage in the Bible is Psalm 23. More than the verses about walking through the valley of the shadow of death is the haunting phrase, "The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing." (New International Version) And the classic King James Version says it this way: "I shall not want." I think about the people in concentration camps and the prisoners in the Gulag and prisoners of war and slaves, how can they possibly claim they "lack nothing"? For me, it's at least a challenge and, at most, wildly offensive. But the way I read it is in the form of a conditional statement. IF the Lord is your shepherd, you lack nothing.

Said in the opposite way: If the Lord is not your shepherd, you lack things. If the Lord is not your shepherd, you will be in dire need. Sometimes we Christians latch on to the idea of "I lack nothing," and "Do not worry" and "Be anxious for nothing." But this idea is contingent upon the anchor and the identity and comfort of the Shepherd.

These days, almost every self-help book addresses anxiety. (A quick Amazon search yielded 50 pages of results.) Most of the ideas about the cure for anxiety is that you can just calm down and not be anxious. Just use box breathing; breathe in, hold, out, hold for four seconds each. NBD.

But, without the anchor of the Lord and His identity, anxiety is not a possibility, it's the status quo, and it's the norm. Particularly when you think about death, what's your plan? Just take a few breaths and hope it works out? Just use 4 seconds of box breathing and it will be fine.

A life fully lacking nothing is the life tied to the Shepherd-to His voice and His patterns and His movements. Anything less is a life of lack.

Photo: @mohamad_babayan