God and Dogs

My family loves dogs.

As much as they cost in food and vet bills and carpet cleaning (or replacing), we just can not find them a new home.  They are a part of us just as much as we are a part of them.

We also like to rescue our dogs.  Our English Mastiff is our newest rescue dog.   We have had her for 3 years now and rescued her from Great Lakes English Mastiff Rescue.www.glmr.org  From our understanding of Cinnamon's history, a woman with bipolar bought her while she was doing well on her medications.   Then she got off of her meds and slipped back into the extreme highs and lows that bipolar people face causing her to neglect the dog.  Cinnamon was not introduced to new people properly and the ones she did encounter often abused her.  The foster mom that had her said that it would take months for Cinnamon to acclimate into our home.

It did not.

That night we brought her home from Chicago, she looked at me when I was sitting on the couch, then climbed up on the couch and placed her head on my lap.

She knew she was home.

She knew she was loved, somehow, someway, she just knew she would not be going anywhere else.

In those three years, Cinnamon has come such a long way in her trust issues with other people.  At first, she would hide when we had visitors and would only peek her head out to look and bark, but she always had to have a way out.   Always.

One time, we had some friends over and Cinnamon was on our back porch.  They were walking up the porch to her and she had an anxiety attack because there was no way out but to jump off the 5 foot tall porch.  And jump she did.  I felt so sorry for her as she wasn't able to trust these people.

Fast forward to today and she is an entirely different dog.  She no longer runs and hides from people, but rather stands back and watches to see if they are trust worthy (of course they are).  If people come up to her, she will shy away, but if she is ignored, then she will go up to to them.

This morning was an early one for a Saturday.  Our German daughter needed to be at school at 7 to catch the bus for a volleyball game. Instead of coming home and going back  to sleep, I fed the horses, did an exercise video and read a devotional book.  While I was sitting down, this is all I saw....

It is kind of difficult to ignore that face.  

So I gave her a little bit of attention and soon, this happened.

Yup, she thinks she is a lap dog.

So how does this all involve God? Well...I have a theory....

I think God is a lot like our dogs.   He is constantly there, waiting patiently for our attention.  When we tell Cinnamon to go away and lay down because she can get a bit smothering at times, she does listen, but she also doesn't go very far in the hopes that we call her back to us to pet her. 

How many times have we told God to go away, you are smothering us? 

How many times have we told him that we don't have time for him because we are busy doing something else?

Monthly? Weekly? Daily? 

I know I do it more often than not.

Yet God is always there, always waiting for us to slow down so he can put his head on our feet so we can feel him.

And as soon as we show him some attention, he crawls into our lap and covers us with his love, his peace, his strength. 

My prayer for us today is that we see God's presence and feel his warmth over everything we do and give that presence some form of an acknowledgement such as "thank you Jesus for. ...."