Sun, Aug 27th - 6:54PM

A Story

Grace in the Valley of Contentment

...for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name.  Exo 33:17

[Let your] conversation [be] without covetousness; [and be] content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.   Heb 13:5

Introduction

            High above where most people live is a range of beautiful, jagged mountain peaks so spectacular in the daylight that they look like the spires on top of a hundred cathedrals.  In the winter these spires are skirted with white snow and glitter brilliantly in the bright sunlight. But in the spring, as the snow begins to melt, the gray of the rocky peaks lengthens and becomes the dominant color throughout the summer, until the snow begins to cover them again in the fall.  Below these majestic peaks is a fertile,green valley where hay grass grows very rich and tall.  The ranchers and farmers in this valley are a simple people who work very hard cultivating their crops and caring for their livestock. This obscure valley doesn’t really have a name, but some of the people who live there call it the Valley of Contentment.

            Sometimes it seems that contentment has been completely forgotten and lost in the world; but if there is one place where it still truly exists, it is in this community that sits above the cities of the plain.  How this valley became inhabited with so many contented people is somewhat of a mystery, and different stories are told about it.  Some say that the rulers of the world began sending followers of someone called “The Shepherd” there as a kind of exile from the rest of the people because they were causing trouble in the cities and communities everywhere.  No one seems to remember what the nature of this trouble was except that a contagious sense of contentment accompanied the folk who claimed this “Shepherd” as their leader.  It is further said that the contentment possessed of these people actually caused a lot of good in these communities.  But, because human nature is the way it is, those who were very discontented, which was just about everyone else, resented these disciples of the “Shepherd” and wanted somehow to get rid of them.

            Whatever the reason for the high concentration of contented people in this remote mountain valley, the Shepherd’s people found a home there, at least temporarily.  Now that the contented people were separated from the rest of the world, everybody seemed to be very happy, even the discontented ones below.  This was because they were finally free to be the way they really wanted, which was really very unhappy, though they didn’t fully realize it, without feeling guilty in the presence of these contented ones in their midst.

            The only problem was that, even though everyone was happy and contented, in different ways that is, the truly contented ones who were up in the valley of contentment were not really pleasing their Shepherd by being so isolated from all of the other people in the world.  His desire was to get more and more people contented by becoming their shepherd, and this couldn’t happen very easily if his followers didn’t go in amongst the others to tell them about him.  The Shepherd was very loving and patient, however.  His love extended beyond those few people to whom he already revealed himself as their Shepherd, and he greatly desired these to go and tell the others of his goodness.  This is the story of one little girl, named Grace, and her family who lived up in this beautiful valley of contentment, and how the great and loving and wise Shepherd used them to bring others into his fold of beloved, chosen sheep.