O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (BCP, Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Easter)

Yesterday, I forgot the anniversary of my father’s death.

It was six years ago—May 10, 2019. I remembered only because I was getting ready for church this Sunday, what we sometimes call Good Shepherd Sunday in the lectionary cycle. The collect and the reading from Psalm 23 tipped me off.

I was putting on my stole when it hit me. These were the same readings I heard in church six years ago, the Sunday after we buried him. They’re etched into memory now, not because of any theological insight at the time, but because they happened to fall on a morning when I walked into church hollowed out and heavy, unsure of what I believed, but still wanting to hear something true.

My dad and I had a complicated relationship. He was not a churchgoer. Like many men in our extended family, he viewed religion as something for women and children. When I told him I wanted to go to Bible college at sixteen, he was not pleased and he rallied former teachers and well-educated friends, asking them to call me, pleading with me not to throw my life away.

He distrusted religion, distrusted religious people, and especially distrusted ‘preachers’. The ones in his stories were often scoundrels—drunks, hypocrites, manipulators. The idea that his son might become one of them was, I think, frightening to him.

In the final year of his life, as he battled terminal cancer, my father became increasingly unreachable. He put up walls between himself and his older children—me, my siblings. I like to imagine he was protecting us. But the truth is probably more complex. I think he was focused—singularly, understandably—on staying alive for as long as possible. He had twin boys—my half-brothers—still in elementary school. He wanted to fight for them, to make sure they were taken care of. I didn’t understand that at the time. All I felt was distance.

That last year of his life, it felt like he had disappeared into a cocoon of treatments and supplements, doing anything and everything he could to stay alive. He tried the silver pills, the special diets, the aggressive chemo protocols. I judged him for pushing us away. Maybe, if I’m honest, I was a little like a teenager myself—resentful, reactive, refusing to see the bigger picture.

About a month before he died, I made myself go back to Iowa to visit him.

When I arrived, we did what you do when you’re in Iowa. We went on a farm tour.

If you're from there, you know what that means: you get in the truck and drive around looking at fields—land owned now or once by family. You talk about corn yields and crop rotations. You point out misadventures and family stories, you name every bird you see—pheasants, quail, turkey buzzards. It’s a form of ritual. For people who sometimes have a hard time just visiting, it gives you something to do while you talk.

We were half an hour into the drive when I started digging around in the central console for a piece of gum. My dad’s truck console was a kind of archaeological site—loose coins, receipts, pens, a handgun (always), maybe some old cash to pay for drive-thru orders.

This time, wedged between the silver supplement bottle and a pair of sunglasses, was something unexpected: a slim, brightly colored devotional book published by Zondervan Press on Psalm 23.

I stared at it. I picked it up.

“Are you reading this?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. It’s been helping. Gives me some peace.”

I didn’t know what to say.

He went on: “I don’t know... the images make sense to me. Thinking of God like a farmer, someone who cares for land and creatures, it makes more sense now.”

I was floored.

For most of my life, I had assumed that he hated religion—and, by extension, hated that part of me. That he saw my calling as a preacher and a theologian as foolish at best, delusional at worst. We had gotten along better, ironically, after I lost my early-stage faith in my twenties. When I left ministry, our relationship relaxed. It was like he thought I had finally come to my senses.

So here he was, a month from death, reading a devotional on Psalm 23. And he hadn’t told me.

I wish I could say I felt immediately moved or blessed. But the truth is I was angry. Angry that he’d never asked me to talk about it. Angry that the door that had been slammed shut for years now stood ajar, and I might never get to walk through it.

A month later, he was gone. And the Sunday after the funeral, I sat in church, hearing Psalm 23 read aloud—and I wept.

I wasn’t just crying because I missed him. I was crying because it felt like I had failed to see him clearly. Because I hadn’t known how to show up to him as a person of faith. Because I hadn’t left room for his own unfolding spiritual life.

I had flattened him into the version of him that I understood: the no-nonsense, nonreligious farmer who kept his beliefs (and his feelings) locked up tight. And maybe he was that. But maybe he was also more. Maybe he was, in those last days, seeking after something deeper—fumbling toward God (like all of us!) in his own language, on his own terms.

And now, six years later, I’m the Dean of a place called the Chapel of the Good Shepherd.

I work in a building named for that pastoral image. I teach seminarians how to preach that psalm. I tell them that the shepherd knows the sheep, that God’s care for us is tender and constant. But the truth is, I’m still learning what that means. Still learning how to see people as more than their resistance or their politics or their distance.

On Good Shepherd Sunday, it’s tempting to think that the sheep are wandering, but maybe they’re just walking a path we don’t recognize.

My dad kept a devotional on Psalm 23 in his truck next to a handgun and a bottle of silver anti-cancer supplements. And honestly, I can’t imagine a better metaphor for the spiritual life.

We are all carrying strange combinations of faith and fear, hope and habit, reaching for something that might bring peace. And as I think about all of this:

I wish I had known how to ask better questions.
I wish I had given him the benefit of the doubt.
I wish I had seen him as someone on a journey, not just someone at a dead end.

But that’s the thing about the Good Shepherd. He doesn’t wait for us to have the right answers. He comes to find us wherever we are—on the ridge line, in the weeds, curled up on the floor of a truck cab trying to find a piece of gum.