Do You Ever Feel Like This?
He Calls You By Name: A Moment with the Good Shepherd
Dear friends,
There are moments when the weight of life does not arrive all at once, but somehow, it feels like it does. So, I sit here at my desk pondering how to manage the weight of many crosses — all at once.
Responsibilities stack. Questions linger without answers. The future presses in. The past whispers back. And somewhere in the middle of it all, we sit, trying, often without realizing it, to solve everything at once.
Today’s Gospel from Gospel of John offers an image that feels almost too simple for such a complicated interior struggle:
“I am the good shepherd… the sheep hear his voice… he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”
It is simple.
But it is not small.
Imagine this for a moment, not as an idea, but as a place.
You are sitting. Quietly. Perhaps burdened. Perhaps tired in a way that sleep does not fix.
And Jesus is there.
Not at a distance. Not as a figure in a stained-glass window. But beside you.
He looks at you, not through you, not past you, but at you. As one who knows.
And He speaks.
“You’re trying to carry too much today.”
There is no accusation in His voice. Only clarity.
“I see what you’re doing. You’re reaching for every problem at once, trying to settle it, fix it, secure it, as if everything depends on you getting it right right now.”
He pauses, not because He is uncertain, but because He is letting you hear it.
“That’s not how I made you to live.”
There is something almost disarming about that.
Because it is true.
We do not just carry today’s crosses. We gather tomorrow’s, revisit yesterday’s, and stack them together until even standing still feels exhausting.
And yet, today’s readings quietly interrupt that pattern.
In Acts of the Apostles, the crowd is overwhelmed, “cut to the heart,” and they ask the question that lives in every anxious soul:
“What are we to do?”
Peter does not give them a complex system. He gives them a direction.
Repent. Be baptized. Receive.
Not everything at once.
Just the next faithful step.
Jesus continues, still beside you:
“You are trying to solve a lifetime in a single moment.”
And then, more gently:
“But I only asked you to walk with Me today.”
The image of the shepherd in Psalm 23 suddenly becomes more than poetic language.
“The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.”
Not because life is easy.
But because the sheep is not navigating the valley alone.
“Even though I walk in the dark valley… you are at my side.”
Notice that.
He does not remove every valley.
He stays.
Jesus leans slightly closer, not to overwhelm, but to steady.
“You don’t need to hear every voice that’s calling out to you right now.”
There are many voices, after all.
Fear.
Pressure.
Regret.
Expectation.
But in the Gospel, He is clear:
“The sheep hear his voice… they follow him because they recognize his voice. A stranger they will not follow.”
So He asks, not forcefully, but personally:
“Do you recognize My voice in the middle of all the others?”
Because His voice does not sound like panic.
It does not rush you into despair.
It does not demand that you hold the whole world together.
His voice leads.
Step by step.
And then, something deeper, something that connects to the cross itself, as described in First Epistle of Peter:
“By his wounds you have been healed… you had gone astray like sheep, but you have now returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.”
Returned.
Not perfected.
Not finished.
Returned.
Jesus looks at you again, not measuring, not evaluating, but knowing.
“You don’t have to earn your way back into My care.”
“You’re already here.”
And finally, He says what perhaps needs to be heard most in moments like this:
“Let Me be the shepherd.”
Not in theory.
Not someday.
Now.
“In this moment, with this weight, with these questions.”
The anxiety may not vanish instantly.
The circumstances may not change by the time you stand up.
But something else does.
You are no longer carrying everything alone.
And so the invitation is not to solve everything today.
It is simpler.
And harder.
And more freeing.
Listen for His voice.
Take the next step.
Stay close to the Shepherd who calls you by name.
And let Him lead you, one step at a time, always toward the light.
—John Henry