CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Can your dog teach you about the unconditional love of God?
Two hours of peace! Ezra, the family cockapoo is away at the groomers, being restored to respectablity!
It’s surprising how many books you can buy about the spiritual lessons we can learn from dogs. I’m not so sure. Your dog can teach you about ‘living in the moment’, they say. But Ezra struggles with this as much as I do - obsessing about the next meal, or the next W-A-L-K. Your dog can teach you about the unconditional love of God, they say. But I’m not convinced Ezra does love me unconditionally.
He does, however, highlight areas of life where I could ‘do better’. Ezra’s idea of a walk involves much sniffing of the undergrowth where previous pooches have squirted territorial markers. In contrast, a walk for me involves walking - briskly.
And so I become aware of my impatience and tenseness. I’m encouraged to breathe deeply, and still my mind.
Ezra expects me to comply with his agenda in other ways too. He knows when it’s time to get up, time for exercise, time for tea, the moment for his 10pm ‘pooch peetime’. It reminds me that I sometimes act as if expecting God to fit in with my plans and agendas, forgetting that true freedom, true fulfilment come when we say a daily ‘yes!’ to the one agenda we were made for.
And I learn from my wife Lorna’s dog-walking skills. I keep Ezra on the lead, afraid that if I let him go, he’ll run after other dogs, or paddle off down the burn. Lorna takes the risk - and sometimes copes with the consequences when pooch ends up wallowing in the muddy duck pond behind the house.
God does not keep us on a lead. God sets us free, trusting us, and restores us and helps us live with the consequences when we mess up.
Lorna entertains and exercises Ezra by repeatedly throwing his ball from a slinger. He idolises balls, and from their pursuit derives great joy.
It reminds me that at times I’m so thirled to my own lists of things to do that I don’t make room for wildness and freedom and joy. God wants to play ball with us.
He’ll soon be back from the groomers clean, neat, fresh-smelling, and his delight to see us will match our delight to see him, and both delights will mirror God’s unwavering, and truly unconditional delight in human beings.
The loveliest thing of all is when I hold Ezra close, and my forehead rests on the soft hair of his domed skull, and somehow this living presence awakens deep in me a healing, a wholeness and peace which is, I think, a gift of the Creator.
