Jesus Is My Shepherd

Most people who sing about shepherds have never met a sheep. Tammy Simister Robinson had. As a child, her family rescued and cared for a motherless lamb while camping in Utah's Uinta Mountains. As a teenager, she stayed overnight at a sheep camp and watched something she never forgot: scattered, panicked sheep growing calm and coming home at the sound of one particular voice — their shepherd's.

Years later, Robinson — a Weber State-trained music educator and choral teacher from Midvale, Utah — combined those two memories with Psalm 23. 'Sometimes songs don't come easily,' she said, 'but that one came pretty easily.'

The song does for children what her memories did for her: it moves Psalm 23 from poetry to experience. The Shepherd isn't a metaphor to decode — He's the one whose voice the sheep already know, who feeds and leads and comes looking when one wanders.

The Church printed a simplified version in the Friend magazine in 2013, and Primary children have been singing it since — it now exists in more than 20 languages.

'Jesus Is My Shepherd' was released February 26, 2026, as hymn #1057, joining the hymnbook's Old Testament–themed batch through the psalm at its root — and joining 'The Lord's My Shepherd' (#1038) to give the collection David's psalm in both a child's voice and the Scottish Psalter's.

Its central promise is John 10 in miniature: 'I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.'