God Lessons from a Dog
I was helping some friends move recently. We’d worked for a few hours. My screwie louie body was starting to scream, so I took a break for lunch.
My friends have this golden retriever; for this story, we’ll call him Buddy. He is big and friendly. He laid his head on my knee and stared longingly at each bite as it entered my mouth.
If you remember me from the early days of my blog, you know that I have Zippy. Zippy is our Frankenstein shelter rescue; he looks like three breeds tacked badly together, he’s deaf, he’s getting cataracts, and his face is lopsided from a surgery to remove his ear canals due to infection. In short, he’s a hot mess that only a softie like me can love.
Which is why I could ignore Buddy’s whines and nuzzles on my knee. My human food would not have been good for him.
I kept eating. Buddy kept whining and nuzzling. I kept ignoring Buddy.
I got to my favorite part. I had a chocolate bar. Chocolate is my vice. I am a card carrying member of Chocoholics Not So Anonymous. I pay very high prices for that sweet elixir of all things good due to my food problems.
Buddy growled and begged. I kept eating. Buddy growled and begged. As I finished the last bite, I told him, “I know you don’t understand it. It’s good for me and poison to you.”
I wonder how many of us Christians are like that with God the Father.
We love him. We lay our heads on his lap through worship and studying the Word. We watch what He does. But then we get to a period in life where we see something we think is good for us. We ask; He says no. We snap and growl by doing more prayer from a wrong motive or by giving up a good practice like Bible study or meeting with other Christians. He still says no.
We don’t get the answer we want because as I was to Buddy so God the Father is to us.
Buddy isn’t as smart or as intellectual as me. He can’t understand that what he sees that is a good thing for me is poison for him. As a dog lover and decent human being, I am going to choose for him the better option is to not give him a choice in this situation. It doesn’t remove my will to choose, and it doesn’t remove his will to choose. It simply removes one choice.
We are not as smart as God the Father. God is God, and we are not. God tells us this clearly in Isaiah 55: 8–9, quoted from the New Living Translation.
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”
Sometimes, when we pray and the answer is “no,” it’s because God the Father knows that what we ask for will not lead to our good. We can choose to force a choice by trying to make it happen on our own, but that places us in a very dangerous position outside of His Will for us.
Our best response is to seek His Will. Let go. Let Him have His Way.
