When I was growing up, we had a beagle. She came wandering hungrily into our camping spot one summer when we were in western Montana trout fishing, miles from anywhere, and we figured she must have been left by someone who had stopped by the side of the highway, probably to give her a rest stop, and she had run off and they had had to leave. She was very cute, very friendly,smart, and could sit up and beg like a pro. She had one major problem--she obeyed on her own terms. We brought her home and she was a reasonably good dog by her own definition. She knew she was restricted in the house to the kitchen, on the linoleum. I found her one evening almost entirely in the dining room--with one rear paw stretched back to have one toe on the kitchen floor.
How often are we like that? The basic thing we are called to do is obey, and we sometimes stretch it as far as we can reach back to home base. One problem with that is that we don't have the freedom we could have with willing obedience. When Spokane enacted a leash law as a rabies quarantine measure, Flopsy hated it. When she was able to slip out of the back yard, she didn't come back by herself; usually we got a call from animal control that she had been caught begging somewhere. Finally it got to where she wouldn't come home at all. She would occasionally see Dad somewhere in town, and she would come up to the car and jump in and be all friendly--until he pulled up to our driveway. She apparently thought of herself as Dad's dog, and she was all for the petting and dog food plan--until obedience was required.
We can spend all sorts of effort struggling with the fences designed to keep us on track instead of trusting that God knows what He is doing. But we miss out on what God could do with us if we obediently commit to what He has called us to do. Linden Malki
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