When my sister and I visited our grandparents as children, we had the habit of crawling into their bed when we woke up between five and six each morning, and pressing the “story switch” – the button on my grandfather’s pyjamas. He would then tell us many different kinds of stories, including stories he had heard, stories he had read, stories he had experienced himself and stories he had invented. There was one particular story I wanted to hear over and over again – the Parable of the Lost Sheep, from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 15:3– 7). My grandfather must have wondered why I wanted to hear this story so often, but nevertheless he told it to me again and again. This was my story, and I needed to hear it. Two key passages appeared in each of my grandfather’s retellings of this story; the first told how the shepherd heard the sheep’s cry for the first time after having searched and called for so long, and then how the shepherd called and the sheep bleated in turn until the shepherd finally found the sheep, and the second told how the shepherd found the sheep stuck fast in a thornbush, unable to move forwards or backwards, and how he carefully freed the animal…