Dog Sense

One of the great values of living with dogs is they reflect to us things about ourselves that we often do not see. Perhaps it is because they are pack animals, creatures tuned into a social context. They make us laugh; they can comfort us when no words can reach us; they help us understand ourselves. But they also lick their butts.

This early morning I was painfully aware of how distant I've grown from God, mainly from my own distractions and simply not spending time cultivating our Relationship. At this point in my journey I am aware what lack of discipline produces in my spiritual life, whether the discipline to read or pray, or especially the discipline Not to say it, look at it or dwell on it. It is this latter discipline, the intention to NOT, that anchors me from drifting away from my Lord.

Dogs have an issue that disgusts me, and though I'd like to think that we can't relate, I now see we share this struggle with discipline: to NOT roll in it. When I was much younger and would let the dogs out, they would occasionally disappear, leaving me distressed and worried. Upon seeing them return my immediate response was to run and embrace my furred friend, only to encounter the most horrid stench. What manner of prankster would do this to my dog? Which neighbor punk poured it all over my little mutt poodle?
And then one day while walking the dog, I saw the rite before my eyes... my dog ran over to a rotting corpse and did this wierd shoulder dive/roll thing, coating himself from neck to ribs in grossness. One mystery solved; another created: why? I soon read how wild dogs rub in a fresh kill or carcass to bring back its scent to the pack. Dogs still carry that instinctual behavior somewhere deep in their being. Unfortunately for all involved, my pack did not eat rotting road-kill.

And this morning I realized that I've been rolling in it again, right back to old, deep patterns. And I really need a bath.

Book Review: Donald Miller's "Searching for God (knows what)"

Rarely do I enjoy a book or written material to the point of repeatedly laughing out loud, but I did with this text, often annoying the students I was accompanying on a school trip.
Perhaps it is Miller's energetic run-on sentances, dripping with the self-reflective voice akin to a Woody Allen flick; or perhaps it the direct, blunt, in-your-face, I-calls-it-da-ways-I-sees-it attitude that drives his sarcasm and word play. I truly enjoy this text.
As an example of the genre of literature that tickles my soul, here Miller describes his first vague impression of the Christian scriptures, reflecting from a recently attended writer's workshop.
Miller writes:
"You would think some of the writers of the Bible would have gone to a Christian writers seminar to learn the magical formulas about how to dangle a carrot in front of a rabbit, but they didn't. Instead, the writers of the Bible tell a lot of stories and account for a lot of history and write down a lot of poems and recite a great deal of boring numbers and then conclude with various creepy hallucinations that, in some mysterious way, explain the future, in which, apparently, we all slip into Dungeons and Dragons outfits and fight the giant frog people. I forget how it goes exactly, and I mean no disrespect. But because it is so scatterbrained, and has virtually no charts and graphs, I am actually quite surprised the Bible sells." (p.49, Searching for God [knows what])