Heaven Has Blue Carpet: A Sheep Story by a Suburban Housewife

When Niedzinski, a suburban Michigan housewife and mother of six, moved into a century-old country farmhouse, she naïvely ordered a flock of Columbia sheep to match her New England Countryside decorating theme. Thus began 16 years of indoctrination into the finer arts of sheep care that included breeding rams, flushing, and the snip, dip, and clip ritual. To her childrens dismay, Niedzinski used the dinner hour to regale her family with the grittier details of shepherding, including cutting off newborns tails, adopting bummer rejected lambs into her blue-carpeted home and accepting that a sheeps destiny is the slaughterhouse. But this is a Christian living book, not a farmers almanac. To that end, each chapter winsomely approaches the similarities between shepherding and its spiritual parallels found throughout the Bible, where a loving shepherd is needed to guide, protect and shelter humanity. Niedzinski so beautifully depicts her foray into shepherding that readers might be tempted to order a flock for their own spiritual instruction. ""(Oct. 14)"" .