Confessions of a Sometimes Dog Lover
This article is dedicated to my 5-pound black poodle, Rocky.
If you are a dog-lover, you are probably smiling and anticipating his cuteness. If you don’t like dogs, you may be wondering why I’m wasting a whole article on my dog. This article is for both of you because—here is my first confession—I love my dog, but only sometimes.
He is cute. Small enough to fit in my lap, he loves to play and chase the ball and knows how to communicate without words. He’s a great snuggler, and provides lots of entertainment. But then again, he is a dog. Just now he was licking his crotch. Ten minutes ago he barfed on my carpet. Helllooo, Rocky, there might be a connection between the two.
What amazes me about this little furball with a walnut-sized brain is how much I learn from him. Rocky is an adventurer at heart, and will escape from our yard any chance he gets. The problem with this is that sometimes he comes back injured, or flea-infested, or he leaves right as I’m headed to work, and I end up being late from trying to get him home. So for his protection and our sanity, we tether him on a long leash in our back yard. Almost daily he gets his leash tangled as he weaves in and out of our patio furniture, gazebo, planters. He has a special bark that lets me know he is tangled and needs help—it’s higher pitched, as if he’s saying, “Hey, I’m stuck, come help me! Come now!”
So I go out to the patio, irritated that he’s interrupting my life again; and irritated that he can figure out how to escape and navigate the labyrinth of yards and dog friends that he visits, but he can’t figure out the tangled leash thing. And I untangle his leash, mostly because he won’t stop barking, but with a little affection because sometimes I love him.
Then I hear a loving Voice in my head and my heart that says, “You’re a lot like him, you know.” Here’s my second confession: sometimes I’m not much smarter than my dog. Whether it’s through bad decisions, not learning from my mistakes, or habits I can’t seem to break, I get my life all tangled up. I weave in and out of the pressures of life, and I end up at the end of my rope; pulling, but I can’t get unstuck.
Here Rocky teaches me that the best thing to do is to admit I’m stuck and call for help. I have a Master who loves me all the time, because I’m His, not according to how smart or “not so smart” I‘m acting. My Master can untangle any mess I’ve fallen into and can teach me how to avoid the same trap next time, even when I’m a slow learner.
Apart from his messes, I love Rocky’s capacity to adore. He adores my husband, Mark, the alpha male in our home. In Rocky’s world, Mark hangs the moon. (OK, he does in my world too, and that’s a true confession.) Wherever Mark is, that’s where Rocky wants to be. Rocky lives as if his purpose is to love and follow Mark.
One day as I vacuumed the hallway, Mark walked past me to get to our bedroom. This presented Rocky with a dilemma. Rocky is afraid of the vacuum. To follow Mark, he would have to get dangerously close to the vacuum. Rocky walked slowly to the edge of the hallway and crouched, ready to make a run for it as soon as the vacuum was far enough away to get around it safely. Then he backed off as the vacuum came back his direction. Then he crouched, waiting for his opening to get down the hallway.
OK, I’ll admit I decided to make a game of it. I began steering the vacuum to see what he would do. About the time it looked like Rocky might get crazy and go for a wild run down the hallway, I would steer the vacuum back his way and watch him back up.
Now, my confession is not that I have nothing better to do than tease my dog; it’s more guttural than that. My confession: like Rocky, sometimes I let my fears keep me from going after what I was created to do. It’s a risk to follow the One I love, and sometimes I forget that He is bigger than the things I fear. Being with Him is worth any pain I might encounter in following Him.
It’s strange to learn life lessons from a dog, especially a cute dog that I only love sometimes and who is trying to lick my hand (not cool after crotch-licking and barfing), even as I’m typing. But it could be worse. I could own a cat. And that would lead to a lot of other confessions.
“If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.” James 1:5