Know Well the Condition of Your Flock

Ask a man how his kids are doing and watch what happens.

Most of us answer fast. Good. Busy. He is doing great, she had a rough patch a while back but she is fine now. It comes out smooth because it is not a report, it is an impression, and we have been carrying it around unexamined for months.

Proverbs has a verse about the difference between an impression and knowledge, and it is written to a man with animals.

Know, and pay attention

"Know well the condition of your flocks, And pay attention to your herds;" (Proverbs 27:23)

Two commands, and both of them are about effort.

Know well. Not have a general sense of. The Hebrew says the verb twice, the way Hebrew leans on a thing it means. Know, and know it for certain. And what you are told to know is the face of your flock. Not the size of it. The face of it. The whole point is that this is a thing you find out rather than a thing you assume.

Pay attention. Literally set your heart to. It is deliberate. You aim it the way you aim a light.

A shepherd who loved his sheep in a general way and never walked among them would lose them, and the verse is written to a man who would have understood that immediately.

Why the verse is about animals

Because animals cannot tell you.

A sheep that is going lame does not come to you. It walks a little differently for a week and then it is a problem. A ewe that is not eating right does not file a report. You find out by being close enough, often enough, that you notice a change.

And a teenager is not that different. Neither is a wife who has been slowly carrying something. Neither is a man in your small group who says he is fine.

They are not lying to you. They are answering the question you asked, at the depth you asked it, in the two seconds you left for the answer.

What the next verses say

The passage keeps going, and it explains itself.

It says riches are not forever, and a crown does not endure to all generations. It says that when the grass disappears the new growth is seen, and the herbs of the mountains are gathered in. Then it says the lambs will be for your clothing and the goats will bring the price of a field, and there will be goats' milk enough for your food, for the food of your household, and sustenance for your maidens. (Proverbs 27:24-27)

Read the logic. Money can leave. A title can leave. What sustains a household over generations is the ongoing health of the living things in your care, and that requires a man who walks out and looks.

This is a verse against the version of providing that is only about income. A man can bring home a good number for twenty years and know nothing about the condition of his flock, and the proverb says the number is the part that is not forever.

What knowing well would take

Let me make this concrete, because a verse like this evaporates into a warm feeling if you let it.

Knowing well means you could answer, without guessing, what your kid is afraid of right now. Not what he was afraid of at nine.

It means you know who has his attention. Whose videos, whose opinions, which friend he quotes. A man can install every filter available and not know the name of the person discipling his son for four hours a day.

It means you know where your wife is tired, and whether it is the good tired or the other one.

It means you could say what each person in your house is currently hoping for, and be right.

I do not think most men can answer all four cleanly, and I do not think that is because they stopped loving anybody. It is because knowing takes hours and nobody schedules them.

If you cannot answer those, that is not a failure of love. It is a shepherd who has been busy at the far end of the field. The proverb does not scold you. It hands you a walk.

How you find out

Not by cross-examining anybody. Every man who has tried to close this gap in one big earnest sit-down has watched it fail in real time, and the kid learns to dread the sit-down.

You find out sideways, in ordinary hours, doing something else.

Driving is the best tool a father has and most men waste it. No eye contact, it ends when you arrive, nobody can leave. A kid will say things at fifty miles an hour that he would never say across a table.

Late is better than early. The same kid who grunts at dinner will talk at eleven at night, and a father who goes to bed on time every night of his life will miss most of what his children were ever going to volunteer.

And ask second questions. Fine is not an answer, it is the end of a first question. What was the worst part of today is a real question. Who did you sit with is a real question. Both of them are harder to deflect than how was school.

The Shepherd who knows

There is a Shepherd who does this perfectly and it is worth putting Him next to us for a second.

He says He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out, and that He knows His own and His own know Him (John 10:3, 10:14). He tells a story about a man with a hundred sheep who has lost one of them and goes after it until he finds it (Luke 15:4). You do not miss one out of a hundred unless you already knew the number.

And when He looked at a crowd, Scripture says He felt compassion for them because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. (Matthew 9:36) He saw the condition. Not the behavior, the condition underneath it.

Two things fall out of that for a man reading this.

One, He knows the condition of your house better than you do, including the parts you have not noticed yet, and He is not disgusted by what He sees there.

Two, He knows your condition. You are somewhere in that flock yourself, and a man who is trying to shepherd everybody while going lame is still being watched over by Somebody who counted him.

Write the four names

Here is the assignment and it takes about ten minutes.

Write down every person in your house. Under each name write three things: what they are carrying right now, who has their attention, and one thing they are hoping for.

Then mark every answer you had to guess at.

The guesses are your list. That is where the walk goes this month. Not a program, not a family meeting. One drive, one late night, one second question per person, aimed at the gap you just found.

You will be surprised how many of the blanks are on the person you would have said you knew best.