The parable of the yelping dog

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I was driving home the other night.  It was rather late into the night, a time where most people are inside the for the remainder of their evenings, perhaps about to get into bed.  And on a busy street, I saw a man jogging with his dog.  The man was jogging at a fairly rapid pace and the dog was doing mostly well at keeping up with the man.  Suddenly, I heard a loud yelping sound.  I looked more closely through the darkness to see a  second dog running after the jogger and the other dog.  The second dog was yelping, almost sounding as if he were crying, as he pursued the man and the other dog.  His tail was so far between his legs that it was obvious this dog was not being aggressive or chasing the other two maliciously.  In his own way, this dog was asking for help.  The man looked back on occasion but continued jogging at the same rate of speed.  The other dog also kept looking back, only to be jerked by the leash to continue onward.  The whole scene hurt my heart a little.

How many of us can identify with the second dog?  We chase our dreams, we follow after love, we continue to encourage ourselves to be the people who God has made us to be.  And we find that no matter how hard we try to keep up, no matter how much we yelp for help, no matter how much our hearts are hurting as we pursue what or who we find worthy of pursuit, we feel that we cannot measure up.  While I am certainly not a dog whisperer, I imagine the dog to be saying, "Wait up!  I just want to be with you guys.  I can't keep up, I just want to be a part of what you're doing.  Please wait, please give me a second to catch up, please stop making me do all this work, please let me be a dog that can simply play fetch and do the things that I like to do."  The man's implied message is hurtful.  "Keep up, mutt.  You need me to stop here, stop there, rest here.  You're slowing me down.  You ask too much."  The first dog looks back and wonders, "Maybe we ought to give this guy a break.  He sounds like he is hurting."  And the man replies, "Don't worry about him.  He'll shape up or ship out."

While this is a very imaginative account of these three characters, I think a story like this applies to so many of our lives.  Who is the jogger in your life?  Who is the person who has told you that you are an inconvenience? Has anyone told you that you are slowing him/her down?  Maybe you are the jogger.  Perhaps you feel that everyone else around you is preventing you from living the way you want to live.  Yelping dogs are inconveniences on your adventure to self-satisfaction.  Perhaps you're the first dog, looking at that jogger and the hurting dog and thinking, "Something isn't quite right here.  Maybe I should do something."

The hurting and oppressed, the ambivalent observer, and the seemingly unaffected person setting the acceptable pace and status quo will always be a part of our society and lives.  Still, there is a fourth character missing from our story.  We are missing the person who denies his or herself, who places value on the other person's needs over his or her own.  We are missing the person who says, "I am here to rescue you, tired dog.  I am here to restore you with my love and I am here to offer you all of me."  For so many of us, Jesus did this.  And in Jesus' infinite wisdom, He creates our relationships with others to do the same thing.  He provides us with marriage to allow us to participate in the most intimate of relationships, where we rest in who we are and find shelter from a hurting world.  He gives us the Christian community, where we can find support and help if we are a yelping dog, an emotionally absent jogger or a uncertain observer.  The list of provisions goes on.

Ultimately, who will we decide to be in this story?  If we look at our lives, we will see that we represent a character in this parable.  Perhaps we are the jogger to one person and the ambivalent audience to another.  Perhaps we feel like the yelping dog in one relationship, but in another we turn into the jogger.  We have the opportunity to be the fourth person, to be the one does the rescuing.  It is not easy to think less of ourselves, to deny ourselves to better love another.  It is not easy to reach those that we do not want to reach.  Perhaps it would stretch us beyond what we desire or what we are prepared to do.

If it were easy, we would not need a God who can provide us perfect strength.  Somewhere, we all find a place in this true story.