Life Is A Powerful Force: I Miss My Dog

Life is a powerful thing. Life wants to keep going. And regardless of what we witness in movies on and TV, killing someone, or something, is hard to do. Life wants to fight back and hold on. Just think of all the weeds that keep coming back. This week we had to put one of our dogs down, and his life just kept holding on. The vet actually had to give a second shot, and she said that sometimes they just don’t want to let go. And perhaps we should have seen that all along in Toby.

We got him six years ago from the shelter in Albuquerque. We had been looking at the possibility of getting a second dog, and I was on their website and saw that they had a Shetland Sheepdog available. We had a Sheltie when I was an infant, although she died before I was old enough to remember her, but grew up hearing about what a great dog she was and how good Sheltie’s were with kids and families, and so I called Linda and we went to see him.

Long story short, they didn’t know much about him and all the strange things he was doing while we were there we explained away as him being stressed of having his life turned upside down and not knowing what was going on in ending up at the shelter. They also said that purebreds didn’t come in very often and if we didn’t take him then, he would be gone by the morning, and so we got ourselves a new dog.

But, when we got him home, we discovered through his behavior that he had been either severely abused or completely ignored in his last home. When he went outside he would run to a small, tight corner where two fences came together and hide. When he came into the house, he would run into the bathroom behind the toilet and hide. That was his existence.

With the help of some medicine to start, and then a dog trainer, and a lot of work, especially by my wife, we got him to become somewhat sociable and acclimated to his surroundings and his family. But, while there were glimpses of a normal dog inside of him, they were fleeting. You could also see that he was trying desperately to try and overcome his past. As he improved when we would come near to him, he might still try and flee, but then would stop and start running in circles trying to overcome his anxiety. Or he would see us and run towards us, and then start circling before coming too close. We actually called him circle dog for a while because that was our interactions.

By the end of his life, we could actually walk him on a leash, he would sit on the couch and come seek an ear rubbing if we were lying in bed, and he played with the children. On his best days, he would even let me walk up to him and let me scratch his ears, but he never really did well with men, which makes me think it was an abuse issue.

In looking back now, I can see his powerful claim of life working its way through. He could have just given up, curled up in a ball refusing to eat or drink and just been done. But he didn’t. He fought, maybe not as effectively as we may have wanted, but from where he was on his first day to where he was on his last day was the difference between night and day. Others, who spent time around him, may have still seen how “off” he might be, but he had made enormous progress. And before we went to the vet on Monday I was able to groom him, a little, and scratch his ears and tell him not only thank you, but also that I was sorry for what he had been through and that we were never able to get him fully over it all, which was not his fault.

On Monday evening I told Linda that what was hitting me hardest is that I missed the idea of Toby. Not in the When Harry Met Sally way of “Maybe I just miss the idea of Helen. No, I miss the whole Helen.” But that I wanted something specific from him, and he and I could not make that happen. I wanted him to be more than he could be, and in that isn’t he like all of us, living in our brokenness? And yet the power of life shone through him to the end. I miss the idea of Toby, but I also just miss my dog.

Connecting In a Divided World

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Romans 13:8-14 and Matthew 18:15-17:

On May 22, 1856, in what is considered one of the low points in the history of the US Congress, Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery representative from South Carolina, entered the senate chambers and attacked Massachustes senator Charles Sumner with a cane beating him within inches of his life for an anti-slavery speech that Sumner had delivered two days before. The violence was seen as the beginning of the “breakdown of reasonable discourse”, contributing even more to the polarization of the country around the issue of slavery, and a precursor to the increasing violence that would lead to the civil war. And yet many historians say that the civil war became inevitable several years before that when the churches began to split, including the Methodists and later the Baptists, which is the reason we have a southern Baptist church over slavery. That when churches could not stay together, people believe, there was little chance for the country itself.

And so most of you here are probably aware of the issues now swirling around the Methodist church and the potential, or maybe likely, schism, which has been postponed at least until next year. And if you’ve been paying attention to the southern Baptist gathering this week, you also know that there was considerable debate there about actions that could lead to many or most African-Amercian congregations, and many others as well, leaving that denomination. This has led to some speculation about what churches splintering again means for us as a country. And then what the last election showed us is that 100% of the country believes that 50% of americans have lost their minds. And so it probably isn’t surprising that one of the things that several people have asked me to talk about, or just asked for advice itself, is how, in these troubled and divided times, we are supposed to deal with, let alone get along with, people who are on the opposite side of some issue, especially if they, or maybe even us, resort to anger and name calling and other derogatory behavior to make their point.

State of the Church

Here is my message from Sunday. The passages were Joshua 24:13-15 :

It has been my tradition, to take one Sunday a year, typically in June, or right around then, to give a state of the church message. To talk about where we have been, what some of our accomplishments have been in the past year, perhaps where we were not as successful as we had hoped, and what opportunities and challenges we’re, things to focus on and occasionally some challenges to the congregation of things we could, or maybe should, be doing. I do it around this time of year because it represents for me, the completion of an appointment year and an anniversary of my time here. Now we didn’t do this last year, because as I said in my preview video sent out in our Friday worship email, I really had no idea what the next week, or month, might bring, let alone trying to forecast what the next year would bring. In some ways that’s still true, although we are coming closer to normality. Additionally, while we had made some good goals for 2020, most of them got put on hold because of the onset of Covid. And that has also sort of put me, and many other clergy in an unusual situation, in that I am now completing the end of my second year being here with you, I don’t really have two years of experience with you all. I have 8 or so months or sitting with you, and visiting with you and working with you, of doing hospital visits and funerals, and the other things that happen in the normal life of a church. And then many more months of doing things very differently than most of us have ever done before. There are some disadvantages in that reality, but there are probably some good opportunities for us to do things differently as we move forward.

And that’s probably a good place to start, because while some people can’t wait to get back to normal, or the way things used to be, we shouldn’t be so quick to just go back to doing what we have done before. This is a great time to evaluate everything and make sure it’s what we want or need to keep doing. So for example, going to online worship is not just a temporary thing. Online worship represents a huge opportunity for us to reach new people in new ways, and many people will feel much safer seeing what our worship is like from the comfort of their own homes than coming here for the first time. And so we are going to keep streaming worship. But that will require us to think differently about worship and what it means to have people here and also people online, some of whom don’t even live in Los Alamos. How do we build community there? How do we deepen relationship and faithfulness in both places? And it’s not even that we can think that our primary purpose is here and that what we do online is just for convenience for some people, because that’s not the way the world works anymore.