Going to the Dogs
By Audrey Stallsmith
I’ve been having to consider the nature of dogs recently, since the one from down the road—named Sammy—began chasing my young guinea fowl. One evening when I looked out and saw only two of the four of them I feared the worst.
Hoping that the missing pair just had just wandered away from the others, I went looking. Out in the vegetable garden, I found a tell-tale scattering of white feathers which proved that at least one of the guineas had been grabbed. (The other eventually proved to be far up in a tree.)
On the other side of a plot of field corn beyond the garden, I found Sammy with the white guinea. Fortunately, it still was alive and—though missing lots of feathers—didn’t appear to be bleeding. Sammy knew he was in trouble, though, because he'd been yelled at for chasing the guineas before.
This time, I smacked the dog once across the back. It seemed to hurt Sammy’s feelings more than it hurt him, because he followed me as I carried the shivering guinea back to the house. Then he hung around for a while with a hangdog look, apparently hoping to be restored to my good graces. I ignored him, since ignoring a dog also is a form of punishment, and I hoped he would get the message that pursuing poultry is unacceptable.
I don’t have high hopes about that, though, since I caught our own dog, Saccy, with a dead guinea once. The one Sammy had grabbed seemed to recover from its shock after a night in a warm box indoors, though it will take a while for all those feathers to grow back.
It just is a dog’s nature to chase whatever runs and it is a guinea's nature to run. So those who train dogs often have to work against the dogs’ natural inclinations, just as God often has to work against ours.
For example, though our Master forbids our pursuit of things such as worldly ambitions and forbidden relationships, we often still automatically chase whichever most appeal to us. We might say it is simply human nature to do so, but we need to remember that is self-centered, fallen human nature--or what happened when Adam and Eve began to eye the forbidden fruit when they thought God wasn't looking.
So, if we feel as if we've been expelled from God's good graces, we'd better start asking ourselves what feathers we have on our faces, what we've been chasing that we shouldn't. Then we can make a determined commitment to puruse the will of God instead, no matter how much that runs against our natural inclinations.
To prove that working against nature can be done, we need only look at service dogs who have been trained to put a handicapped person’s needs before their own. One of those can teach us a thing or two about how we relate to our own Master. Because such an animal’s owner can’t constantly reward it with treats for all the tasks it performs, it works for approval instead. In most cases a simple “Good dog,” is all the pay it gets.
Those of us who know how much pets like their treats might think the dog would feel cheated. But, from the relief Sammy exhibited when I finally spoke to him, I learned how important it is to dogs that they be acknowledged.
In fact, a service dog’s master doesn’t have time to make a big to-do over every task the animal performs. So, it often is working simply for the pleasure of serving the owner it loves. If we don’t take similar pleasure in our efforts for God unless we receive acknowledgement, perhaps we don’t love Him enough.
Granted, this metaphor lacks something, since animals don’t have souls as we do. But, if you think I’m insulting us humans by comparing us to dogs, keep in mind that C. S. Lewis once compared Christ’s becoming human to one of us becoming a slug or crab!
A good service dog also ignores distractions and keeps its attention fixed on the person who needs help. God obviously is powerful enough that he shouldn’t require our assistance. But he has handicapped himself, in a sense, by choosing to work through human beings. So, if they aren’t paying attention, the work doesn’t get done.
We can try to excuse ourselves on the ground that we didn’t get the message. But, once a dog has been serving a master long enough, that animal knows its responsibilities and performs them automatically. It may have learned, for example, that part of its job is to pick up dropped items which a person in a wheelchair can’t reach. So, the animal often will do so without waiting to be asked. In the same way, those of us who have been Christians for years should automatically respond in a helpful rather than hurtful manner, but often don’t!
And even the best-behaved canine companions have their limits. One veterinarian tells how he regularly treated a Seeing Eye dog for ear mites, and that almost perfect pooch didn’t enjoy the intrusive doc handling its ears. So, one afternoon when the blind man was late for his appointment, the veterinary looked outside to find the Seeing Eye dog leading its charge past the door—going the wrong way.
The animal obviously already had passed up the clinic once. And, when its master realized they had gone too far and turned it around, it tried to sneak past the dreaded place again. If it could talk, the poor dog probably would say those visits were about its health anyway, so it should be able to pass them up if it wanted to!
We, too, may serve cheerfully enough until our comfort zone is breached. Our obedience may only be complete until it begins to become painful, until God wants to bring to light some of the unpleasant creepy crawlies still hiding away in us. We may believe those problems to be as small as the dog’s mites, but—like those minuscule insects—they eventually can cause larger issues. So, they must be eliminated even if treatments aimed at our improvement are as excruciating for us as they were for that Seeing Eye dog.
Actually, most of us pet-owners can only dream of dogs as intelligent, helpful, and almost always obedient as those service animals are. Our pooch wants to be in and out at least a dozen times a day. In fact, she sometimes will scratch at the back door and, after coming in, go immediately to the front door to be let out again.
A previous old dog once took to scampering down the steps into a back room where she had no need to be and then whining to be carried back up five minutes later. No sooner was she up for a short while than she went back down again. Fortunately, that phase didn’t last long.
Granted, the senior dog was old enough to be partially blind and easily confused . The younger one isn’t! But I’m guessing their restlessness actually sprang from boredom. Dogs who have nothing to do other than be pets probably aren’t happy unless they are receiving attention.
In relationship to God, many of us prefer to act more like spoiled pets than like obedient children. We make the relationship all about ourselves and only turn to God when we want something—whether feeding, reassurance, or a hand up or out—and then become restlessly dissatisfied with our own ineffectiveness. Perhaps our constantly making the same mistakes over and over again looks as idiotic to God as our dogs sometimes look to us. That stupidity also makes us useless for His work, if we constantly require rescuing instead.
As Paul writes in Romans 12:1 “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.” In other words, our work for our Master is no great sacrifice, but only what should reasonably be expected from those of us who have been loved and adopted despite our formerly brutish ways.
Since God has made it plain that part of our service to Him is serving other people, we shouldn’t have to be asked to do that—or thanked. Our helping them, after all, is part of our helping Him. They may never even notice, but God sees everything.
We may have to wait a while for our “Well done” from Him. But it will be accompanied by an “Enter thou into the joy of they Lord.”