He was a shepherd. He was the type of person the townspeople talked about behind his back. He was a gentle man, everybody agreed, but he was so quiet. So strange. They looked into his black eyes and wrapped their arms around themselves to ward off the evil spirits clearly lurking in those abysses.
“The dust is three inches deep!” one woman said after glimpsing the inside of his house. “And there’s sheep manure in every corner! You don’t think he actually lets them sleep with him, do you?” The children listened and laughed. The adults listened and told the children sternly to stay away from the old man’s house.
The old shepherd watched the people with a kind of deep pity. “They’re just like you, old girl,” he said, stroking the tired ewe behind her ears. “They’re like sheep without a master, the superstitious creatures.” He blew out his candle and watched the smoke curl to the blackened ceiling. The soft darkness hid the etched lines of sorrow in the old sheep herder’s face.

He was up before the sun touched the silver waves of the sea. He knocked his toe against the leg of his chair, and sat back on the floor for a couple minutes, holding his foot in pain. He shuffled around, putting crumbly cakes of bread, dried pieces of fish, and three sheets of papyrus carefully rolled up and tied, in a brown sack.
All that long, dry day he watched the sheep. He sat on a knoll above the town, and saw the wind blow puffs of dust over the houses. The people hoisted sails, gutted fish, ran errands, sold fabric and grapes and, of course fish, at the market, and the children screamed and cried and laughed and played. The shepherd dipped a quill and wrote, “We’re just like sheep. We are forever waiting for a master.”
He heard the thin, high bleat, saw the gray figure darting and snatching, and felt the sick waves of remorse before he had time to do anything. “A wolf killed another lamb today,” he wrote. “ I shall have to find me a lad to help.”

Night fell over the hills, the sheep bedded down, and the old shepherd laid his head on the brown sack and watched the darkness come, like it had every day of his life. “Sometime,” he thought, “ I would like to never have to wait for the darkness.” Then he laughed at himself, because he was an old man who was dreaming of the impossible.
He saw a light appearing, coming closer, and he thought, “Is it morning already? Or am I an old man who doesn’t know his dreams from the real world?”
The sheep got up and huddled together, watching the sky. The shepherd put his hand over his eyes as the light grew brighter. He heard the voice, and saw the white figure standing before him, and then he grabbed his staff and swung it over his head. “Get away from me, devils! I’m possessed by my dreams!”
“Don’t be afraid.”

The old man sank back into the hill and listened to the angel. A great wonderment filled his heart as he heard the news. No, this was not a dream. This was prophecy meeting reality. And he couldn’t wait any longer. He jumped to his feet, grabbing his staff and running down the hill. He ran as if his feet were winged.
The shepherd lived that night like he’d just been born. He forgot the wolves, the mocking fingers of the townspeople, and the loneliness that had been a part of him for as long as he could remember, as he knelt on the hard manure—crusted ground before the Holy Child.
The sun was making the heavy dew on the cobblestones sparkle as he emerged from the dank—smelling cave. He ran, shouting and singing, down the streets, telling everybody what he’d seen.
They didn’t believe him. They pointed fingers and jeered, or they him like a leper.
None of it hurt. Not even the occasional pity. None of it mattered anymore. After all, they hadn’t seen the Messiah.