Seeking the right answer

Warning- I was wrong about the furminator. I found a small abrasion on poor Honeybun, which I strongly suspect is from the furminator. And we decided Lucky has two somewhat bald spots, again courtesy of the furminator. My grooming friend tells me the furminator is a blade on a handle, and most people (yours truly included) don't understand that and should be very careful using it. Guilty. Thus I retract my endorsement and will continue to vacuum 40 times a day to try to stay ahead of the dog hair collection. I will continue to use the low tech dog brush, which costs $5.95, but which poses no danger to our dogs.

With the furminator debacle laid to to rest, I went on a walk to Shadowlake, where the beautiful swans used to glide. It is not the same without the swans, but it is still a peaceful place to walk with the dogs. I was trying to work out the solution to the SAT question of the day. Once a day, I get a question sent to my email from the SAT organization, preparing me for college entrance exams. I do not intend to return to college, but I thought it would be good practice for both me and Asherel, and how long could one question a day take? The first two days, I got the questions correct in 10 seconds. So did Asherel. This was day three, and a math problem. A quadratic equation. Need I say more?

So I wandered along the lake shore thinking about the hint that was given with the question. It reminded me (tactfully suggesting that this was something I once knew in the first place) of the vertex quadratic formula. This hint did not help me at all, because in the formula were variables that I had no idea what they were, specifically h and k. I looked out at the peaceful waters of Shadowlake, and wished the swans were still there, then headed home to cheat.

  I did a google search on h. That gave me a whole series of new formulas and told me that h and k were the vertices of the parabola, graphed by the equation. This helped a little, believe it or not. I plugged in the one vertex I knew, and after about twenty steps, arrived at the correct answer. Now it was time to explain the answer to Asherel, who had also unsuccessfully attempted the question.

I brought her my two pages filled with computations. At the 4th or 5th step, I could not remember why I had done what I had done.
"Do you want me to go do Spanish while you figure this out?" she asked.
"No, I want you to try to figure it out with me."
Finally, about twenty minutes later, we plowed our way through  to the correct answer. It is perhaps a good thing that I am not intending to enter college again. And Asherel has four years of SAT question of the day to help prepare her. I hope this is a wise approach. I hope I am not inflicting hidden wounds, like the furminator.

Sometimes there are no Biblical precedents to help in some of the dilemmas of life. One has to glean from general guiding principles. In the midst of all this angst of the day, I was faced with a philosophical question. If the world seems to be swimming one way, people you even like and respect, yet your own conscience will not let you float along with them, do you fight the current? It is so much easier to hop on the bandwagon. Maybe my conscience is misdirecting me. Am I becoming legalistic, patronizing, self righteous? But why won't my conscience let me off the hook and give in to those things which a majority opinion seems to coalesce around?  I admit that I am growing weary of trying to stand against a flood. Every parent knows what I am talking about at some point in their role as guide and protector of our children. I won't go into specifics but the furminator episode made me wonder. Do we sometimes think we are doing something good, something wonderful...but we are abrading a soul underneath? I just don't know.

I looked over my computations for the quadratic equation. Under test conditions, would I have been able to arrive at the correct response in a timely manner without the hints? No, not yet. But if I did this every day, trained myself bit by bit, perhaps in a few years I could. I suppose seeking God and His Way is a similar process. Day by day, grow more sensitive to His voice speaking to my conscience, and perhaps each time the answer will come a little more easily, a little more clearly. This daily digging to the depth of how the Spirit is guiding me has the exact opposite effect of the furminator- it is the kind of scraping that heals wounds, not inflicts them.

Job 27:6
I will maintain my innocence and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.

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A World of Grief

In proofing the copy of my book, I was struck again by the world I had found myself plunged into- animal rescue. I had known nothing about the depths of suffering that animals endure for human pleasure and comfort. But my year of rehabilitating the dog we rescued, Honeybun, and of working with Hollow Creek Farm Equine and Canine Rescue  (HCF) taught me that human beings are not very kind to the creatures they are supposed to be caring for during our mutual stay on our melting planet.

I have been reflective of late, as I reread the book and ponder the lessons of Honeybun. Would I be able to do it all over again? If I found another dying dog with all those horrendous issues, could I manage to do what I did with Honeybun? HCF deals with this every day, and has for years. Honestly, I don't know how they do it. I don't know how I did it with just one dog.  After talking with some very dear people who asked me to tell them about Honeybun's story, they joked as they drove away, "I sure hope we don't see a dog dying on the side of the road as we head home...."

And that's the thing....a strong conscience will not let you keep your eyes closed forever. And suffering dogs are just one small part of the suffering organisms here on earth....what about the house spiders getting trampled on in every kitchen millions of times a day, not to mention starving children in Africa? It is overwhelming the amount of grief that lurks at every turn. No wonder as a people we drown ourselves in drugs, and alcohol, and stupid television shows.

When I was a little girl, I remember going down the street thinking about things like this even at the tender age of 5,  and crying. I remember one of my parents' friends stopping me and asking why I was crying. I immediately stopped crying, shrugged my shoulders and trudged on. When he was out of sight, I started crying again.

So I went kayaking with Asherel to have an hour of communing with nature, with man and creature in balance along the lovely Catawba river. I know the better choice to walking down the road crying is to seek the good, do the good you can, and trust the results to God. I peacefully dipped in and out of protected coves along the shore, watching the Great Blue herons hunting, and then settling into their nests overhead. Peaceful quiet enveloped the river and turtles popped their heads out into the sunlight.

Suddenly there was the high pitched roar of a jet ski. The water beneathe me became an ocean of waves as it roared past me, obviously ignoring the sign, "SLOW-- no wake."  Perched on the front handlebar, held firmly there by its owner was a daschund, with its long ears whipped straight back. It had a look of terror on its pointy little face.

So much for harmony of man and creature, I thought.

Ezekiel 34:2-4

² “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? ³ You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. ⁴ You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally.

The Grass Really is Greener on the other Side

As I was scrubbing feed buckets covered with spiders and all the little packages of fast-food flies wrapped in silk to-go boxes, I saw another volunteer at His Barn walk by leading a pony by his chin. The black pony had no halter or lead rope. He followed obediently, like a dog being pulled by his ruff.

Then she walked him to the front yard, the unfenced front yard with a road in front of it, and let him loose. I stood up, shocked.
"Wait... do you mean to let him loose? I mean with no tie or anything?"
Jill, the owner, was off on a trail ride with Asherel while I did my little corner of work to help her out.
The volunteer nodded, "Yes, he just stays."
"But how?"
"Oh he's trained."

Jack, the pony went right to work mowing the lawn. Jill runs the barn on her own with an assortment of volunteers. There is never enough money or hours in the day to do all that is required. I was happy to see she had found a time saving method of keeping her lawn cut.

The sky became dangerously dark, and just as my daughter's group returned, the heavens let loose, and rain gushed from the sky.  Jack came slowly back to the barn and peered in.
"What do you think you are doing?" asked Jill.
Jack looked at his stall, his forelock dripping.
"You aren't done with your job yet," said Jill.
Jack turned and went back to mowing the lawn.
"Doesn't he go in the road?" I asked.

Jack was meandering towards the road. He stood at the side of it and looked back.
JIll watched him.
"No, not unless I am inside and then sometimes I will see him look at the house, and make sure I am not around and then he will cross it."
I watched Jack. The grass on the other side of the road really was greener, and tall, and lush.
"How did you train him to do this?" I asked.
"I made it very unpleasant for him when he stepped in the road, banging pans, yelling, screaming, making noise. And as soon as he stepped back on the yard, I made it quiet and peaceful.It's all about pressure and then removing pressure in training a horse."

I remembered that morning with my Science Olympiad kids. I had invited them out for an afternoon of kayaking as a celebration/thank you for all their hard work this year. I had enough kayaks between our inflatable ones and hard shells for all the kids to be able to kayak together. I was the kayak cop, in my beloved little inflatable. When I saw them bumping each other, and  (in my eyes) tipping perilously as they grabbed at each others' boats, I made a lot of noise. I was employing Jill's horse training method.
"No bashing into each other, and no grabbing each other's boats!" I shrieked, "Those are the rules. If  you follow the rules, I will follow far far behind you. If you don't follow the rules, I will be right on your tail."

They weren't pleased that I was preventing their escalating attempts to dislodge each other into the lake of snapping turtles, but they had no desire for me to be bobbing in their midst either. So they obeyed the rules. They knew the grass was greener on the other side of the rules, but since I was in sight, they thought it best to obey.

But I kept thinking last night about Jack the pony. Well-trained as he is, even a pony figures out that when the Master is not around, he can cross the road to the greener grass. He knows it is wrong, but the enticement is too strong, the scent of the succulent thick grass too overpowering.  Similarly, I have little doubt that if I left those kayaking kids and said, "I am off to go get a pedicure, see you in two hours", every one of them would soon be upturned in the lake with half their toes nibbled off by the snapping turtles.

It is almost impossible to resist the siren call of the forbidden. This is a lesson Adam and Eve learned to their most unhappy rebuke. The most ironic thing of that whole Garden of Eden thing is that they knew God was watching.... that God is always watching.  Even Jack the pony checks to make sure Jill isn't there before he crosses the line. It really is hopeless, if we are forced to depend on ourselves. Who of us can deny cheesecake sitting on the counter, no matter how many caloric and cholesterol warning signs are posted? Or any host of forbidden sins? It is easy to point fingers at the "idiots" who come out of lung cancer treatment and light up a cigarette as soon as they leave the hospital....but how about at myself, when I speak a harsh word to a loved one, or gossip, or cling selfishly to my possessions (like my beloved kayak that I won't let anyone else get in......)?  Why is it so hard to be obedient?

As Jack mowed the lawn, Jill told me she had been through a year of very pressing medical issues with Jack. She had been with him night and day through many bouts of colic.
"We formed such a relationship that honestly, if he turned around and started speaking to me, I would not be surprised."
That, I thought, that is the key. Not making noise, or rules, or even dire repercussions, but forging a relationship so based on love and care that hearts long to beat only in rhythm with their Master. We obey because we love, and we know that to disappoint the One who cares for us above all else is not worth any pleasure, not even lush, green, glorious grass.
 Jack glanced at Jill and moved away from the road.

1 Corinthians 4

 ¹ This, then, is how you ought to regard us: as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. ² Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful. ³ I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. ⁴ My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me. ⁵ Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.