SADIE AND CRATE
About a year and a half ago, I got a new dog to go with my newly acquired back yard. I couldn’t wait for the companionship she would bring, and she does. However, she brought a whole lot more into my life than I anticipated. Life hasn’t quite been the same.
To mention just a few of her hobbies, she pulls down loose fence posts and digs holes so deep that I am pretty sure I can hear people speaking Chinese. On walks she pulls for the first ten or fifteen minutes of the walk – at least that long, and sometimes longer. It’s not the idyllic stroll through the streets that I had imagined. I tried every hot item on the market, every collar type that even hinted at the capability of stopping the pulling. I have bought collars that looked like instruments of torture as well as ones with the name “Gentle” in the title. I even bought the one that the Dog Whisperer’s wife designed, but to no avail. Our walks still consist of this motor boat out in front and me in her wake.
I remember crying out in frustration one day as she was choking herself by pulling on the leash, “Sadie, you are making your life so much harder. If you would just stop doing these things…”
“Sadie is a lot like you.” I knew that voice. The Lord was speaking, was again using something in my natural life to speak to something in my spiritual life. I gulped and knew exactly what He meant. I pulled, I dug, I chewed – everything I wasn’t supposed to do and little that I should have done. My life could have been so much easier. He even told me that she would submit if I would. (I’m happy to say that both of us are pulling less these days. Still pulling, but pulling less.)
However, I was concerned about her in the back yard by herself. Meter readers who hop over the fence aren’t always good about closing gates. Thunderstorms hit with alarming suddeness. Sirens wail, and garbage trucks go by. And sometimes Sadie gets scared.
After talking to the experts, I began to crate her. Each morning in she would go to this small “box” in a dark room, there to sit until I got home about ten hours later.
Now I know that there are many people who crate, and I am not making a case against it. There were things I liked about it. But it just wasn’t Sadie.
Have I mentioned that Sadie is joy personified? That she can nudge a plastic Frisbee around a cement porch for 20 minutes at a time, making a noise that can only be described as first cousin to fingernails on a chalk board? That she can spend hours watching birds fly overheard and squirrels dart from tree to cable line? She loves to stretch out in the sun, or even inspect the flower beds in the midst of a gentle rain. She loves nature; she loves life. It’s what she was made for.
In short, I just couldn’t continue with the crate. I couldn’t stand almost one half of her life being spent in that dark room.
We are like that, aren’t we? God has given us everything – the world, people, His promises, His Word, and yet we spend much of our lives in crates of one type or another. Unlike Sadie’s crate, our crates are forged from fear and disappointment, or unforgiveness and hate. Perhaps others have put us in a crate, keeping us from being who we were destined to be, locking us up because of some need or unhappiness in their own lives. And sadly, in some cases we have been crated by churches who have wanted to keep us from the fullness of what God has for us.
Well, I have gotten a dog door and a dog gate, and I’m sending Sadie into the back yard once again, starting tomorrow. There’s a difference this time; this time she will have a safe place she can come when the storms and dangers of life come. Whenever she gets afraid, she can duck back to her sanctuary, her little utility room where she knows she will be safe, just as I know I can run into the shelter of My Father’s wings when the storms come in my own life when I am “out there.”
So I’ve made a decision: no more long hours in crates in this household. Both Sadie and I are getting back out there in life, back where we belong.
