From the Rector…
The newest Frazer fur baby, Charlie, is learning how to walk on a leash. When we got him, he already knew sit, stay, and down. He had obviously been on a leash, but I’m not sure he had ever been on “walks”—at least not neighborhood walks for exercise.
At first, Steve would take him separately from the rest of us. I would leash up the other three and go one way while Steve took Charlie in the other direction. That worked until it didn’t. One day, Charlie broke out of the back door before Steve could get him leashed. In his excitement, he ran into the street to greet a neighbor who happened to be walking by. Then he saw me and the other dogs and took off down the road to join us. I was able to put Cutty’s lead on him and get us all safely home, but Steve and I decided it was time for all of us to walk together.
Walking all four dogs at the same time turned out to be more challenging than we anticipated. I continued to walk Cutty and the Tweedles while Steve walked the Kraken. Cutty is a great walking buddy, but Petunia and Archie bring a lot of drama. They are easily distracted by birds, squirrels, cats, other dogs, patches of grass—you name it. They love to walk and are high energy. What we didn’t take into account was how much Charlie would feed off their energy. Where he did pretty well with Steve on solo walks, he was now like a golden seismograph—detecting the other dogs’ excitement and magnifying it by about 400%.
On our walks, Charlie acted like a toddler who had missed his nap and been given a Red Bull. He was akin to the guy who gets ejected from a Waffle House at 2 a.m. He was still sweet, but in all his excitement, he resembled more an emotional support tornado than a Golden Retriever. We knew we needed to get more serious about his leash training, so I started walking him before taking the other dogs out.
There are several methods for leash training, but I like keeping the lead directly under his chin and changing directions whenever he starts to pull. That first day, we didn’t get far. We made it around the corner, but not down the street. We stopped, started, and changed directions so often that I got confused about which way the house was. Though we hadn’t even gone around the block, by the time we got home we had walked more than a mile—much of it over the same ten feet of terrain. The second day was a little better, though not by much. But now, a couple of weeks into it, Charlie seems to be getting the hang of it. This morning, we only had to change course twice and covered a lot more ground in one mile than we had before.
Discipline is hard. I know Charlie is doing the best he can, and he is a quick learner for the most part. But my patience gets worn thin, and my arm starts to hurt from correcting him and the tension he puts on the lead. Some days I think I should just let him walk like a Kraken running amuck through the neighborhood. But I want him to be able to walk with our pack. That will take time and discipline. Though the training is hard, I know the payoff will be great. My other dogs are proof of that.
Christian discipleship is a lot like learning to walk on a lead. It requires discipline, patience, and practice. It takes time and space in our lives, and we rarely see immediate results. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, we begin to learn a different way of walking. We become less reactive, more attentive, and more able to follow where God is leading us. The payoff is a life marked by greater joy, hope, and love—a life that is fuller because we have learned to walk with God and with one another.
Charlie brings plenty of that joy, hope, and love into our lives too, even in the midst of all the training and frustration.
Light and Life,
Candice+