Why?

“Why do they stay among the campfires to hear the whistling for the flocks?” Judges 5:16

That was the life that they knew the best and had come to love. They were simple people with a simple lifestyle and derived simple joy from the simple things that they did daily. What more could others ask of them? They had no great ambition or lofty aspiration except the simple desire to shepherd their own flocks and to raise their own families. Some of them might have been highly intelligent and others very creative, but it made very little difference to their lives. Intelligence and creativity didn’t set them apart from the masses. What they did to make a living required no such attributes, therefore rendering whatever they were endowed with worthless.

“Did you know yesterday was the two-year anniversary of your father’s passing away?” my mother asked me over the phone this morning.

“I forgot,” I said to my mom, feeling a little sad about it. My dad’s untimely death two years ago isn’t something that I enjoy thinking about, yet his presence seems to be ever-present in my life. My father was a simple man who tended his ducks and his children the best he could and took his love and concern for his loved ones with him when his time came.

“What difference did it make for my father to grace the earth for seventy-some years?” I ask. Was raising a family the sole purpose of his fleeting existence? Perhaps. What else can we ask from man with a lowly family background and no formal education except to till the land and raise a few children? Such are the things that most people on earth have done and will continue doing before the world comes to an end. So why was a question such as this even raised? “Why do they stay among the campfires to hear the whistling for the flocks?”

There was something soothing about the whistling for the flocks, wasn’t there? It was the end of a long day of roaming the fields searching for green grass and still waters and their reward was a hearty meal and a sweet sleep. I used to follow my dad behind a flock of ducks at sunset after a long day of work, rejoicing at the fact that I would get to eat and play into the night. I remember the twenty-minute cow cart ride home on the narrow dirt road when the sunset was behind our backs and the village ahead of us, bathed in the warmth of an autumn dusk, and there was nothing in my mind but a warm meal and evening rest. I stayed beside the campfire and watched the flocks, for that was the only life I knew, the only life my father and my father’s father knew, a life they had come to enjoy.

Why was this question even asked at all? What else could they have done except the simple things that they did to make a hard living, to keep their children from starving, to make life a little more tolerable that what it was? Perhaps this question would have been moot unless there was threat coming from the north, coming to rob the shepherds of their simple life and simple joy. Perhaps that was exactly what happened that took Deborah from husband and children, and forced many shepherds from their loving wives and glowing hearths.