My Little Dog

 

Waylong on my lap
Waylon my dog

Waylon, my dachshund-pinscher dog,  is a Katrina survivor, brought into Oklahoma City after the flood with other animals and people. My daughter adopted him at a shelter and when she came to live with us  for a short while, she brought him and another dog with her. My husband and I grew to love them both, so when she moved out, she left Waylon so I wouldn’t have “empty-nest syndrome” again, like I did in 2000 when she moved off to college.

My daughter realized after she was with us a while that she had lost his heart. He started sleeping on the foot of our bed one weekend when she was gone. Now don’t give me that “song-and-dance” about not letting the dog sleep in the bed with you. It’s too late for that. He already does.

When my daughter first got Waylon, she left him in a crate while she went to work, and he had terrible separation anxiety while she was gone. She and Waylon worked through the problem and he is much better. I look in his solemn eyes and wonder what he saw during the flood of New Orleans. What did this little darling dog live through?

Now he has a new assignment in life—me. He adores me. He follows me from room to room and guards me. His usual place is under my feet at the desk while I work on the computer. He likes my husband and they have fun together but he loves me. He still loves my daughter; she rescued him, but she doesn’t need him like I do.

When he sits at my feet at mealtime, he expects me to give him a taste. I deliberately don’t eat it all so I can slip him a leftover bite. Even so I buy good dog food.

In Matthew 15:26 NKJV Jesus told the woman from Canaan, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”

She must have been a dog-lover because she said, in verse 27 “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ tables.”

I don’t give him the t-bone steak but Waylon gets the bone.

Vinita Trains

 ‘Waiting on a train’ is a good excuse in my hometown if you don’t use it every day. No one questions it, because it happens to everyone. Trains are a fact of life in Vinita, Oklahoma, a railroad town built at the junction of two train tracks in 1871.

Every citizen of Vinita, young or old, rich or poor, male or female, laborer or businessman, has learned to live his life around the train schedule. When a train is on the track across a main street in Vinita, all traffic stops.

There have been several train-vehicle fatalities in Vinita so the railroads have invested in gated flashing alarm systems at most intersections.

 Some drivers still want to drive around the gate arms meant to keep them from being hit by a train. When the lights start flashing and the arm begins to lower, even I groan and am sorely tempted to step on the gas and race to beat the train, rather than slow down and wait 5 minutes for the 10-mile-long train to pass. Or maybe I see that I might be able to make it to the next corner if I rush, so I make a sharp right, gas it but by the time I get there, the gate has started coming down there too, so I have to wait anyway.

The very thing that is meant to preserve lives has become a great source of irritation to most townspeople.

Paul said in II Timothy3:16 nkjv, “ All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”

In our busy life we have this tendency to bypass spending time reading and studying the word of God.  And then we find ourselves not living by what it says.

When the alarms flash in your conscience and the gate arm starts to drop, is your first thought, “How can I find a way around this without getting caught?” That should indicate it’s time to see what the Bible has to say about what you should do, not what you can get away with.

God sent His Word to direct us, to preserve us, to protect us, to live by.

God of the Now

            Let the past be the past, let it go.

            Let the now be the now, let it flow.

            Do not linger in the past,

            No longer live in fear.

            Let the past be the past, let it go.        

There is no past as far as God is concerned. When your sins are washed away by the blood of Jesus, you have no past. And from where God sits in eternity, time does not exist. There is no such thing as the future, because He sees the whole picture. It’s His plan, the victory has been won by Jesus Christ forever, and we can trust the future to Him.

 When the thought comes to you of all the wrong things you have done, let those thoughts spur you on to do right, but don’t let those thoughts linger on, tormenting you. God isn’t condemning you, He sent His Son Jesus Christ to die to save you from your sins and give you eternal life. If you have accepted Jesus as your Savior and Lord, any condemnation you might feel comes from the evil one or your own memory.

 Lay those ugly old scars of your past at the feet of Jesus once and for all, and never think about them again.

 In Philippians 3:13-14 kjv, Paul said, “Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

On the other hand, when the thought comes to you of all the wonderful things you have done for Jesus, let those thoughts spur you on to do more, but don’t let those thoughts cause you to relax or quit,  because the jewels in your crown for years of faithful service to the Lord will outshine any star.      

God is the God of the now. Press on.

Study the Bible

 

Every year when school was out, the other kids could be found playing baseball, roller-skating, riding bikes, or swinging, but I was inside reading a book. I got my first library card when I was in the 3rd grade at 8 years old.

If you come to my home to visit, you will probably be amazed at all the books, magazines, and newspapers cluttering my home. Why is it that I have such difficulty discarding books? It all goes back to my mom and dad who trained us children to value books. From the day a little cloth book was put in our baby hands, we were taught to love them. Don’t tear the book. Don’t write in the book. We love our books, don’t we?

My school teachers influenced my love of books. At the beginning of the school year, when books were given out, I opened the first page to the label that showed who used the book the year before and  proudly entered my name on the next line. If the book was new, we went through a procedure of “breaking in” the new book, by opening up to the middle and running our fingers down the middle, then opening to another place in the book and doing the same. We were taught to never open the book and bend it backward which would break the spine.

I can only think of a few times in my lifetime that I have actually thrown a book in the trash. Most times it was because the book was badly damaged, but several times it was because it un-Biblical. How did I know? Because I know what the Bible says.

It is said that banks train tellers to recognize counterfeit bills but giving them the real bills to study. If you know what the real thing looks like, you should instantly know when something is counterfeit.

In 2 Timothy 2:15 nkjv Paul says, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

How do I know the truth? I study the Bible for myself.