But what catches you short on some lonely evening of despair isn’t a doctrine that you remember or all those verses you memorized from the book of Romans. What creeps up on you is the inexplicable emergence of this image of the shepherd from the deep recesses of your imagination’s storehouse. With the image comes the story of a shepherd who is willing to leave the ninety-nine goody-two-shoes sheep who’ve done everything right in order to find that one stubborn, recalcitrant lamb.
