“We are, all of us, ‘walking through the valley of the shadow of death’;

not just now, but always, every day of our human lives. It’s a beautiful

image for a grim situation. Imagine a flock of sheep wandering through the

Judean countryside. These aren’t the happy green hills like the Emerald

Isle or your old Windows XP background, but the dry and rocky hills east of

Jerusalem, where the mountains roll down to the Jordan River and the Dead

Sea. Picture the flock walking down into a deep valley, a dry river-bed, in

the late afternoon, as it suddenly becomes dusk.”