Sheep Tracks:  Biblical Insights from a Sheepherder  by Dennis Rowan


You can tell whether I like a book by the number of pages I dog-ear and mark-up for follow-up referencing by underlining or highligting favorite passages.  After reading this book for little more than two hours, I realized I had already marked it up quite a bit and turned down the edges of so many pages, it was starting to look like my teacher's edition for British Lit.  There's just that much useful information in this little book, all of it for the spiritual edification of the believer.

It's not a book that tells a particular story though many stories are told within it.  It's not an anthology of feature articles or deep, philisophical essays.  But I think it's far more useful as a daily devotional guide than the best of the chicken soup books.  As author Dennis Rowan states in the introduction, you can read the book from cover to cover or just skip around.  There's no particular order to the chapters though he has placed them in sort of a chronological order.  Each chapter presents a biblical truth cleverly wooven into an allegory about raising sheep.   The reader learns about sheep from a shepherd's viewpoint, which teaches how much the Good Shepherd cares for His sheep.

My favorite chapter so far is Chapter 6, called "Yearlings."  Rowan describes yearling sheep as "unpredicable, ungrateful, unmanageable" and sometimes "unlikeable."  As a father and former teacher, I could easily see a direct correlation with teenagers.  But he doesn't leave it there.  Again, teaching from the viewpoint of a shepherd, he reminds us that these yearlings are also "our most valuable resource."  They are our future.  If the shepherd will only spend a little extra time with his lambs before they reach that yearling stage, they won't be so hard to deal with later.  That one really hit home.  I had to stop reading and pray.  The same thing happened when I read Chapter 20, "Night Watch."

Rowan gave up his successful career teaching agricultural technology in a major university in 1982 so he and his wife could return home to his family farm in southern West Virginia.  In addition to running a working sheep farm, the Rowans started Psalm 23 Camp for teens and Christian retreat in 1985. Information about the camp can be found on their website, www.psalm23camp.com.  Sheep Tracks can be purchased through amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com or ordered directly from the publisher through Rowan's website or the publisher website, http://www.hissheeptracks.com/.