My Life as a Border Collie

I couldn’t have been Michelle Duggar—not enough fingers.

One of the challenges of having four children aged five and under is keeping them corralled in uncontrolled spaces. Home is easy: You close the doors, and know they’re somewhere within the property lines.*

In public, though, it’s a different story. Once the boys were past strollers and leashes, keeping tabs involved counting. A lot of counting. I mentally tapped each of the blond heads hundreds of times every time we ventured out. In the mall: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. In the campground: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. In the park: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

Our congregation has just started a sermon series on spiritual gifts, those individual enablings the Holy Spirit shares to allow us to contribute well as part of the spiritual body. Yesterday Pastor S encouraged us to complete an online inventory that would help clarify our own spiritual gifts. I’ve taken these inventories before, but I had to laugh when the computer tallied my answers. What gift popped to number one on my list?

Shepherd.

Of course.

*Well, mostly easy. I’ll never forget my horror at answering the doorbell one beautiful spring morning and finding a perfect stranger on the porch holding the hand of three-year-old Boy #3. She had found him wandering along our busy street in his pajamas. And when I say “perfect” stranger, I mean she let me off with a lecture on proper parenting and didn’t turn me in to children’s services for neglecting my toddler. Who knew he had figured out how to open the storm door?