My dog ate a chicken bone yesterday on our walk. I don’t know how she found it buried under the stratum of ice, but, presumably, her nose led her to it. She dug it up, ate half of the frozen thing, and growled at me when I tried to take it away. She got half, I got half. I suppose that’s fair.
While she was chomping down her half, I stood on the sidewalk shouting things like, “Drop it! You don’t want that! That might taste good now but that’s going to hurt coming up (or out)! You stupid, stupid dog! Drop it!”
(Please don’t call The Society on me for my verbal abuse because if I didn’t care about her, I wouldn’t have yelled. Yelling = Care. Sometimes, anyway.)
I once told my daughter that our minds, thoughts, ways, in comparison to God’s, are a bit like Lulu’s mind in comparison to ours. I believe I fetched this out of the reservoir of analogies given to me by my dad. In other words, dogs just don’t get it. They are incapable of getting it. Oh dogs can be smart, in their own charming way, but they’ll never understand things like… let’s say… electricity. Or why eating a chicken bone could possibly be a bad thing.
There are things—many things—I don’t fully get either. Things that God nudges me to drop. Like pride or bitterness or my own plan. Or sometimes the notion that I can change someone or fix a situation. It might not make sense to us, but dropping it, as much as we get some satisfaction from gnawing on it, might be for our own good.
There’s a time to fight it and a time to drop it, and even though that’s not exactly what Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, it’s the same general principle.
In her doggie language, Lulu was telling me yesterday, “NO! This is mine, all mine, and I WON’T give it up!” Lord help us when we take the same attitude. Sometimes laying down our chicken bone in full submission leads to a nice juicy steak. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes our surrender is an act of obedience and trust. And maybe the steak comes later. Much, much later. Nevertheless, drop the chicken bone.
Rachel Allord 