Who's Actually Leading Your Life? A Fresh Look at Psalm 23

If you've moved to Charleston recently and started church-shopping, or if you've never stepped foot in a church in your life, or if you used to go and walked away disillusioned — this post is for you. No judgment, no jargon. Just an honest conversation about a question almost everyone wrestles with: how do I know what to do next?

At Courageous Church, Pastor Dave kicked off a new six-week series built entirely from questions the congregation submitted themselves. Out of 120 questions, one theme dominated — nearly a third of them circled around some version of "How do I know what I should do next?" Career moves, relationships, life after graduation, just keeping up with the pace of everyday life. It's a universal ache.

The series digs into Psalm 23 — "The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing" — probably one of the most familiar passages in the Bible, and also one of the most misunderstood. We tend to picture "shepherd" as a soft, cuddly image: someone who just comforts us. But a shepherd's real job is to move the herd — to lead. And that reframes the whole question. Maybe the issue isn't that we're bad at making decisions. Maybe it's that we're not used to being led.

Here's where it gets relatable: sheep wander, resist, get stuck, and ignore direction — not out of rebellion, usually, but because they just get their heads down and start munching on whatever's in front of them. Sound familiar? We drift the same way — not through some dramatic decision to walk away, but through the slow accumulation of distraction. A busy season. A missed morning. A day where we never once paused to ask, "God, what do you think?"

The good news, according to the message, is that this shepherd doesn't respond to wandering with frustration — he responds with joy when we come back. That's the picture Jesus paints in Luke 15: a shepherd leaving 99 sheep to go find the one that wandered off, then throwing a celebration when he finds it. Not a lecture. A party.

So what do you actually do with this? Three simple, doable things: address whatever's causing the drift in your life (even something as small as starting your day with a moment of quiet instead of your phone), start doing what you already sense you should do rather than shopping around for a different answer, and trust that the plan being offered might be better than the one you're gripping so tightly.

Whatever category you fall into — new to town, new to faith, or wounded by faith — this message isn't asking you to have it all figured out. It's asking a simpler question: who's actually leading your life right now, and are they worth following?