He cares for us because he can make something beautiful with the very characteristics he has given us. And he will. Valuable we are to him. Sheep don't do anything to adorn themselves. On their own backs, wool isn't even beautiful.
Sheep get filthy, the wool is tangled and a sheep near shearing time is ugly.
The beauty is there, but not for the sheep himself, and not visibly. Its value is only in the eye of a shepherd who loves his sheep because of what it is producing, all unknown to itself. And only the shepherd can see beyond grim and matted wool to what he will make of it once the sheep has been shorn. I want to read you something a friend of mine wrote several years ago. Or you can clean wool slowly and gently and inefficiently, by teasing the matted fibers apart with your fingertips and letting the dirt fall out.