The Bitter Replaced with Honey

oh no. With just 3 days to go till Honeybun's weekend agility trial, she was limping. We checked over her legs and couldn't find any painful spot, but then examined her pads. One had a scrape on it. Not really even a cut...but obviously it hurt. Fortunately, we have the world's best agility instructors and they offered to have me bring her to them and they would wrap it for me and assess whether she would be able to run over the weekend.

"I know this is going to sound strange," said Laura, "But first we put honey on it."
This does sound strange, but I have a lot of homeopathic friends and had heard of this wound treatment. And it was particularly fitting for my dog, Honeybun, to have Honeyfeet. Laura wrapped Honeyfeet's foot, and put a cute little blue bootie on top of the wrapping.
"She should be fine by Saturday," Laura told me.

Honey does do miraculous things.
For example, the Bible tells us that the promised Land is a land of "milk and honey" which was so compelling that the Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert to reach it. I am a little lactose intolerant, so I could do without the milk part, but who can resist honey!? Furthermore, we all know you catch more flies with honey than with a flyswatter. This is symbolic advice, for those of you who never took a course in literary analysis, and means that violence never works as well as gluttony. The Bible also tells us over and over again that honey is the sweetest physical food, but it is not as sweet as Wisdom. I rarely taste Wisdom, at least not as ravenously as I should, so cannot vouch for the veracity of this, but if anything is sweeter than honey, then it is probably worth pursuing. And now this newfangled healing power of honey on top of all its other pleasing attributes!

But in my musings about honey, I also was struck by the irony of honey. Here is the sweetest substance known to man...and yet to get at it, one has to survive the danger and pain of bee stings. One has to cover oneself in armor, as the beekeepers do, so that the stinger cannot penetrate to their skin, and even then one has to know what one is doing to extract the honey safely. Protection, knowledge, training.... without those three things, one is highly unlikely to get the honey and live long enough to taste it. I think in some ways, living for God is like that. We are told that there is an adversary who wants nothing more than to snatch us from the pursuit of God. We are told we need to protect ourselves, to put on the "full armor of God", including things like a breastplate of righteousness, helmet of salvation, etc. We need to have knowledge of God, which we rigorously pursue by pouring over His Word. Finally, we need to have training in the ways of God by seeking to obey what He has commanded of us. With those three elements in place, we are much more likely to reach the land of milk and honey without being mortally stung.

After Honeyfeet's pad was all honeyed up and wrapped and bootied, she trotted happily with no limp to the car. How does honey work, I wondered? Apparently, it's sticky viscosity is good to seal the wound, sometimes replacing the need for stitches; its properties have a slow release antibacterial agent that kills the germs, and if one is forced to chew off the affected limb, it tastes much better. If only all of life's wounds could be so quickly dealt with!

Proverbs 24:14
Know also that wisdom is like honey for you:
If you find it, there is a future hope for you,
and your hope will not be cut off.



-save a dog- hollowcreekfarm.org