For those of you that don’t know, I graduated from college with a degree in math.
For a person to be a math major, you have to like playing with numbers.
I love the challenge that I get in math when I try to solve a problem.
Early on, I learned one of the biggest secrets of math.
That secret is that you need to be able to manipulate numbers so that they look differently, yet they are still the same.
(simple example… by taking ½ and multiplying it by 2/2 to get 2/4…we all know that 1/2=2/4…sometimes we need 2/4 instead of ½ to solve a problem)
If you can learn how to do this, math starts to become easy, and it is almost like a game for me so it is fun.
Through a lot of repetition, I have learned to see patterns with numbers.
I can now see short cuts to manipulate numbers in certain situations so that I don’t have to spend hours experimenting with different ways until I find a way that works.
My point…my brain is always looking for patterns no matter where I am.
The other day I was writing a blog.
I had typed God on my screen.
I was sitting there thinking, and I was staring at the word God.
I started playing with the letters in my head.
I rearranged them, and I came up with the word dog.
God and dog…they have the same letters.
I thought to myself, “That’s kinda cool.”
That got me thinking back to some of my English classes in high school and college.
(Quick background:
When I was growing up, I hated English classes.
I probably hated it because I was really bad at writing papers.
Not only were my papers garbage, but they also took me hours to write.
To this day, it takes me at least on hour to write the first sentence of a paper.
Not an exaggeration!
I will write a sentence and then delete it because I don’t like how it sounds, or I can’t think of my next sentence, so I just start over.)
Back to the story—this connection that I made with God and dog reminded me of the one topic that I found pretty interesting in my English classes.
Palindromes.
I am sure you remember what palindromes are, but if you don’t, they are words, phrases, verses, or sentences that you can read the same way backward and forward.
You know words like bob, kayak, radar, or civic.
They are all the same backward and forward.
But then some English dork, (very much like myself, but I like math), came up with palindromes that are sentences.
Things like…
Gary
knits a stinky rag.
W
e panic in a pew.
Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
He did, eh? (A Minnesota favorite)
Seriously, in a really dorky way, how cool is that?!
If you just read them and didn’t look at them, go back and read them backwards.
I will wait….
Cool huh…these are just the tip of the iceberg.
There are so many of them it is amazing, and these are really short ones.
Right now…I am guessing someone out there is saying, “Seriously, you are talking about palindromes.”
I know it is pretty random, but that is just how my brain works sometimes.
When I made the god/dog connection, I actually googled this idea to try to remember the word palindrome because I couldn’t think of what it was called at the time.
I ended up finding it out and I was reading some of them when one of the palindromes caught my eye.
GOD, A DOG?
God a dog?
Wow!
That is a pretty bold comment, even if you are just trying to be funny, (which it isn’t).
Anywho…I started thinking about this.
Is there some truth to God being a dog?
There is a saying that a dog is a man’s best friend.
I want the kind of personal relationship with Jesus that he is my best friend.
I used to take my dogs for walks.
Right now, I am on this amazing journey with Jesus.
It didn’t matter what I did all day, but when I decided to go home, my dog was always so happy to see me.
God can’t wait for me to come home to Him no matter what I have done.
(Story of the prodigal son Luke 15:11-32, read it if you don’t know this story)
My dogs protect me when they sense danger.
God protects me too.
Dogs are such loyal animals.
God is always loyal to me.
Dogs mark their territory.
God marks His territory with His love.
There were times when I would just be laying around and one of my dogs would come plop down either next to me or on me because they just want to be with me and near me.
God definitely wants to be with me and near me.
God, a dog?
T
hese are some really good traits that I see in dogs that I also see in God.
I guess that isn’t a totally horrible statement.
But then I started thinking…He does all of this great stuff for me, but how do I treat Him?
I quickly realized that there are times when I treat God like a dog.
Let me share with you how I treat God like a dog.
#1—When I was growing up, I thought my dogs would always be there for me.
I can clearly remember coming home after my dogs had been put to sleep.
Not even thinking about it, I would walk up to the door after a busy day and I would expect them to be there.
I thought that they would be there bouncing off the walls because they were so excited to see me.
But I remember opening the door and they didn’t come running outside.
I would just stand there and remember days when they were alive that I would come home in a bad mood, I would open the door and they would come blasting outside, and I wouldn’t even acknowledge them.
I took my dogs for granted.
I just wish that I could come home one more time and had them come running outside all hyper and then go on a long walk with them.
I do that with God too.
I take Him for granted so much.
There have been way too many days in my life when I have been having a bad day, and the last thing on my mind is to acknowledge God, even though He is all around me bouncing off the walls with excitement to see me.
I just walk right by Him. I don’t love Him.
Thankfully, God isn’t going to disappear like my dogs did.
Everyday we wake up, He gives us that one day to make up for not acknowledging Him, not loving Him, and taking Him for granted.
Anytime you or I want to go on a long walk with Him, He is more than willing to start a journey with us.
He is willing even if we haven’t acknowledged Him and loved Him in the past.
#2—When our dogs were younger we would lock them in a kennel when we had to go places.
We did this for a couple reasons.
First, we didn’t want them to get into the garbage and start eating it.
We also didn’t want them to run wild in the house and mark their territory while we were gone.
I do the same thing with God.
I try to lock Him up into certain areas of my life.
There are some places that I don’t want God to go.
I don’t want God to get into my garbage and make a mess.
I also lock Him up because I know that if I don’t, He will probably run wild in my heart and start making His mark all over the place.
That scares me a little bit.
I know that if I let Him do that, I will probably start crying when I see what He has done.
And I am a man, and men don’t cry, so I try to avoid that.
But I need God to get into my garbage and make a mess.
If I give Him access to my garbage, He will go through it and start eating it up and it will start to disappear.
The stuff He doesn’t eat, He will clean up by Himself.
He will clean up the mess because I can’t.
I also need to remember that it is a great thing to let God run wild in my heart.
I need Him to make His mark even if it causes tears.
Those tears are usually tears of joy because I am deepening my relationship with Him.
(FYI…men do cry!)
The more I get to know God, the harder it is to lock Him up.
He just sits there, and He looks up at me with His big puppy dog eyes and says, “Kyle, please don’t lock me up again.
I promise I am going to clean up the mess I make, and the mark I make in your life will change you forever…for the better.”
#3—When I was younger we had this really cool thing for our dogs.
It was a high-tech leash system.
You know…the one that screws into the dirt and then you can attach a leash to it.
We would use it to limit our dog to where it could go.
It would limit the dog from leaving the yard.
It would limit the dog from chasing the neighbor kid riding by on his bike.
Because of this leash, I was so convinced that my dog couldn’t do some things.
However, there were a few times when my dog really wanted something badly, so he ripped the screw out of the ground and crossed the limit that I had set for Him.
When this happened, I would end up having to chase down my dog.
I would tell him how bad he was for crossing the limits that I had set for him.
I would walk him back and re-screw the screw into the ground and redefine the limits.
I do this with God too.
I have Him on a spiritual leash.
In my mind, there are certain limits that I place on God.
These limits are things that seem impossible to me.
Things like raising people from the dead, making a blind man see, or feeding thousands of people with very little food seem impossible.
I seem to think in my mind that God just can’t do that.
So often I forget Matthew 19:26 when Jesus said to His disciples,
“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
I am still in the process of getting rid of the limits I have placed on God.
I have a feeling that in the next year there are going to be things that God wants to show me.
Even with my crazy limits set for Him, a spiritual leash isn’t enough to hold God back.
I have a feeling that He will be ripping the screw out of the ground many times just to show me that He has no limits.
#4—My dogs really loved people food, and peanut butter totally fits into the people food category.
Being the dog lover that I am, I usually wanted to give my dog something it liked, right?
So there were times when I would give my dog peanut butter for a snack.
FYI…if you have never seen what happens, I recommend trying it sometime.
What happens is the dog gets the peanut butter stuck on the roof of its mouth so it will lick for like 5 minutes straight trying to get if off.
It isn’t painful or anything to the dog, it is just very amusing to me.
Although I was doing something that my dog liked, this wasn’t really an act of love.
There is totally something in it for me if I gave him something he wanted.
I would do it because I wanted to laugh.
Similarly, there are certain things God wants me to do like pray, read the bible, worship, etc…but I often find myself doing these things because there is something in it for me.
I do things because I want something from God.
For example…if I want something to change and go my way, I pray to God…or if I am upset, then I pray to God because He will make me feel better…
Both of these are just a couple examples of how “faithful” and “loving” I can be when there is something in it for me.
God doesn’t work like a dog with peanut butter on the roof of his mouth.
A dog has this auto response that causes it to lick for few minutes straight. But God doesn’t have this auto response. He doesn’t just give us what we want.
He doesn’t just fix things because I want them bad enough to pray for a day or two.
So often I tend to do things because there is something in it for me, and I need to stop that.
I need to start doing these things out of love for Him and because He is who He is.
God you share some pretty amazing characteristics with dogs.
You are my best friend.
You protect me.
You love me unconditionally.
You always loyally stand by me.
You are always excitedly waiting for me to come home to You.
Yet, I forget this far too often.
I still take you for granted. I still only let you into certain areas of my life.
I still try to put limits on what you can do and I can only seem to do what you want when it will benefit me.
God, I’m sorry. I need to stop treating you like a dog.
I need to start appreciating You just for being You.
I need to start loving You because You are You.
Please forgive me.
