When You Get the Realization
We adopted a couple of rescue mountain weather puppies. Well, they are not puppies anymore.
The rescue society that we got them from buys them from breeders who didn’t or couldn’t sell them and are anxious to get any money to offset their costs. The implication is that these puppies are at least six months old and, at best, have had little interaction with people (at worst, they were kept confined to a small cage and may have been physically abused).
When we went to look at one, we found a brother/sister pair who were scared of any personal touch. We couldn’t split them up so one puppy for us became two. We have a good size fenced in backyard and, when we built our back deck many years ago, we created a good size dog house underneath. As summer evolved into fall, my wife started worrying about how to get these puppies into the house for winter.
As the temperature started to fall, they became more energetic and happier. This is typical of the breed. And try as she might, my wife could only get the female puppy into the house and only for a few minutes at a time. I believe she was worried about her brother who refuses to come on the deck, much less into the house.
All of this is background to this last week. My wife went out of town and I was given instructions on continuing my wife’s plan to get the puppies more comfortable with human touch and to encourage them to come in. I had no more success over the last week than she had. Anyway, we stopped to grab a bite last night and she was lamenting that if only the puppies would give in and accept us, we would shower more attention and love on them than they could possibly imagine. I started welling up. She asked me what was wrong. I told her that I was imagining God wanting us to know the same thing.
Even typing this I am getting a little verklempt…
“If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.” - Deuteronomy 30:16 ESV
“In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” - 1 John 4:9-12 ESV
The puppies, or the “destructo twins” as we sometimes refer to them, are slowly accepting us as their providers and protectors and our sincere desire to shower them with love and attention. How slow are we resisting giving ourselves to God for the same thing?
