The Rancher Who Came Looking

In 2019, a cattle rancher named Dale Pennington outside of Broken Bow, Oklahoma, noticed that three of his weaker heifers had gone missing after a late-spring storm. The stronger cattle had crowded them away from the shelter and the feed troughs for days, and when the storm hit, the three had wandered through a downed fence line into rough hill country.

Dale could have written them off. Three head out of two hundred is an acceptable loss in the industry. But Dale got in his truck at 4:30 the next morning, drove every back road and fence line for six hours, then parked and walked on foot into a wooded ravine where he found all three — one tangled in old barbed wire, one limping badly, one simply standing alone and trembling in the brush.

He treated the wire cuts himself. He splinted the injured leg with a piece of PVC pipe and veterinary wrap. He loaded them one at a time into his trailer and brought them home to a separate pasture where the stronger cattle could not bully them again.

That is the heart of Ezekiel 34. The Almighty declares, "I Myself will search for My sheep and look after them." He does not send a hired hand. He does not accept the loss. He goes after the injured, the strayed, the ones shoved aside by the strong. And then He does something the fat sheep do not expect — He judges between those who pushed and those who were pushed. The Good Shepherd does not merely rescue. He sets things right.