I just want to be a sheep....

Maybe you have heard the little kids song: "I just want to be a sheep" or maybe you are wondering what in the world is she talking about? Here is a little short video that you can watch to see what I am talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqOoMwWNfMI&feature=related
So, thats all cute and all but we are in college why do we care about silly little kids songs.
This song has been perpetually stuck in my head since January when we sang it over and over in Haiti. Those kids absolutely loved this song. The French Creole word for sheep is mouton. The kids would yell mouton, mouton, mouton. Then we would sing the song again! We also acted out some Bible stories involving sheep. It was really fun and funny. At the end of each chorus we would yell "what do you want to be?" The resounding response was "MOUTON!!" By the end of the week the kids were seeming obsessed with sheep. When we did pipe cleaner Noah's Ark animals and of course nearly all the kids requested that a mouton be made for them. We made playdo animals and of course sheep again took center stage. I have no idea why they liked sheep so much. I didn't see a single sheep in Haiti; several goats wandered around, but no sheep. Maybe they wanted to make us happy because we kept talking about them and acting like them crawling around on the dirt floor bleating like sheep. I am sure it was quite a sight to see the parable of the lost sheep acted out.
I have always wondered though if the connection was made between sheep and people. In the Bible, people are continually related back to sheep. Having raised sheep for the past eleven, twelve years now, I can verify that people really are like sheep. And sheep are DUMB! Now, don't go getting all offended. A point that can be made here though is that we as humans can perceive them as dumb creatures because God has granted us a mind that on a much higher plane than that of a sheep. It's not the sheep's fault and it is no credit to us. It is only because we are designed that way by our Creator. However, imagine that you were the shepherd of a flock of sheep and you look out and see a problem in your sheep. They keep making the same mistake but aren't getting anywhere. You have to go help them. I think that God uses the sheep and shepherd relationship because of how so many situations play out. The shepherding society of Bible times would have easily related to this comparison.
Another way people are like sheep is that they always follow the same path. In a sheep pasture you can often observe a path leading from the barn gate out into the open field. The sheep will walk the same path pretty much in a line out to the field where after a point they will begin to branch out to graze. In the evening they will follow this same path back to the barn. If you were to move the gate down the fence line during the day while they were out, when you call them back in the sheep will congregate where the other gate was and holler. Eventually they would find the new gate but to help them along you would need to guide them through the first time. They don't like change. Sheep might be dumb but they can be exploited in three different ways: their tendency to flock, absent-minded following of a feed bucket or hay cluster, and just general predictability.
The sheep at our house could be trusted after a certain period of time of getting used to one another to all follow a leader. So we could take one sheep, preferably the sheep who proves to be the lead or bossy sheep, and put it on a halter. All of the other sheep would follow and walk behind and around the lead sheep though they were not restricted in any way. I never ceased to be amazed by this. If you think about this, people do this too. They will just follow along with the crowd though they might not want to individually go that way.
Sheep are also very greedy. They will follow a feed bucket wherever it leads. They focus in on obtaining personal gain and forget about whatever trap they might be walking into. This can be easily used to move sheep from one pen to another or to load them on trailers and such.
Sheep are also very predictable. Like I said earlier they will follow the same routine every day for the rest of their life. They don't like to get out of their comfort zone. For our show sheep, yes I showed livestock :) , each of them needed a specific diet so we would have to separate them at feeding time. This could be easily achieved. Each of the sheep could be trained to enter into different little slots where they would receive their food. The sheep would eventually even stand behind the gate to their slot when they heard the feed being poured into their pans.
So if you are reading this and are like why in the world would I want to be compared to a sheep? That sounds so degrading! I think sheep have many positive qualities as well such as their complete abandonment for their shepherd. I think that they can also be respected for their simplicity of life. They truly have no other concerns other than their shepherd and their fellow flockmates. I also think that sheep were compared to humans because sheep cannot exist without a shepherd. Just as we cannot exist without our Shepherd. Goats can live on their own, but not sheep. I am of course limiting this to domesticated animals only. There are wild species of sheep but they are completely different than the domesticated sheep and goats that the Bible is referring to.
This is my little ramblings about sheep but I want to end with Scripture. There are many many verses about sheep, however my two favorites are Psalm 23 and John 10.
Honestly those two sets of Scripture could take up about ten blogs apiece. So, since I have already written such a long post I will keep it brief. In Psalm 23, David writes about how God provides for us in all these wonderful ways. In John 10, "the other disciple" writes about a parable Jesus told to the Pharisees and the Jews about the different people who care for sheep and how the Good Shepherd would lay down his life for the sheep. This is nine short chapters before Jesus is crucified.
I want to come back to these chapters and write about them more in detail.