To Be Tender

Let us help you count your sheep

I tuck in the youngest each night: two in the bunk bed, one in the crib. Every evening they request the same song so we sing it together, always someone squirmy and loud and off-key, always making me smile in the dark.

Tender Shepherd, Tender Shepherd, let me help you count your sheep.

One in the meadow, two in the garden, three in the nursery, fast asleep, fast asleep.

The song comes from Peter Pan, a sweet melody from the 1960 musical with Mary Martin that we watched a thousand times as kids. I must have resurrected it as a tired new mom coaxing babies to bed, but it became firmly anchored as a bedtime offering once Catechesis of the Good Shepherd came into our lives.

What better way to fall asleep than to remember we’re tended by the best shepherd?

Tender Shepherd, Tender Shepherd, watches over all his sheep.

One, say your prayers and two, close your eyes, and three, safe and peacefully, fall asleep, fall asleep.

(Turns out the original lyrics are “safe and happily.” Back in the haze of sleep deprivation I forgot the last line when we first started singing. So we sing for peace now instead, and I like it better. What’s more peaceful than tenderness?)

//

This summer I got to spend a week writing with a group of theologians whose work I once imagined for my own. But each evening as we gathered for wine and cheese, and they swapped stories of tending their institutions as we shared dinner and washed dishes, I realized over and over again: their work is not mine.

I am tending five children, and a mid-life marriage, and a new collaborative ministry, and my own writing and speaking, and friendships and families, and a home and a corner of land. But I am not tending students or schools or research or colleagues, not in the ways I once pictured.

There is peace in remembering we are each called to tend, but not called the same.

//

To tend is to be a tend-er: the noun of the verb, the one who cares. But over time (and hope, and prayer, and sweat, and laughter, and tears) the one who tends can create what is tender. 

A skilled cook preparing a meal. An author crafting a book. A parent raising a child.

To be tender is to show sympathy, to cultivate kindness. To be tender is to be young and vulnerable, needing protection and care. To be tender is to be sensitive to pain, the opposite of tough. Reaching in different directions, every meaning of the word traces back to the Latin tendere: to stretch.

Whom and what do you tend? What stretches you?

Maybe you tend children. A plot of land or a plot of a novel. A new neighbor or a dying friend. A dream of different work or a new season edging on the horizon.

Maybe you tend your local church or local politics, the wants and wounds of the people right around you. Maybe your thoughts tend toward those suffering an ocean away: the vast world in need of tending and tenderness.

Whatever we tend will change us over time if we let it, tenderizing us toward more of what makes God’s heart tender: humans, who are hard to love and we do it anyway.

The holy labor of what and whom we are called to tend.

//

Tender can bring invitation: try this steak, taste these potatoes. 

Tender can raise warning: watch the scar, avoid the subject.

But this one word which evokes what is soft, vulnerable, and easily wounded also evokes the Tender One who watches over those who are soft, vulnerable, and easily wounded.

God holds every definition together. The Tender Shepherd becoming a tender sheep. A lamb of a newborn, needing mother and milk. A grown man whose skin could be bruised and beaten. A Sacred Heart sensitive to every pain we experience, vulnerable to every pain we inflict. 

I sing all of this when we pray in the bedroom dusk with the youngest, wanting the Shepherd to watch over them, to protect them and to keep them tender to the world’s wounds, all at once. I want every meaning of the word for them, and I also resist that their tenderness will bring their vulnerability. The tension between the two is where we have to live as humans (and where I wrestle most as their mother).

All of that in a lullaby as I kiss them goodnight. All of that in a whispered prayer as I start another day: help me tend what you ask me to tend.

//

Let us help you tend.
Let us help you shepherd. 

Watch over us, as we work and rest.
Watch each act of tenderness, each act of love and labor offered in your name.

Count it all as prayer, every piece of creation we try to tend.
Hold it as hymns, our holy stretching toward you and the ones you give us.

Make us tend-er. Keep us tender.
Make any act of care into an Amen. 

Only that, Lord. All of that.

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Find my books here: Everyday Sacrament | Grieving Together | Prayers for Pregnancy & Birth | To Bless Our Callings | The Extraordinary Ordinary Time