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Life Experiment of Faith

 What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me. (Job 3:25)

What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off.  In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.  (Matthew 18:12-14)

          COVID-19 has the world in its grasp – no big deal. But let my dog escape and “Houston, we have a problem.” I thought I’d closed the inner door, so I left the outer ajar to put laundry in the washer The next thing I knew, there was something honey-colored sliding by. It doesn’t happen often, thank God, but that might make it worse when it does. In the end, I think I had five other women helping me try to find and trap her – because she thought it was all a wonderful game of keep-away while I was imagining vultures cleaning up Shiba road-kill.

          So, I can honestly say that I know how the shepherd who goes off to find the one lost sheep, leaving the other ninety-nine on their own. All that mattered was finding and catching her. There was a lot of “Please, God, please.” The world shrank down to the size of a 20 lb. dog. Now, in the aftermath, while she’s chilling on the bed without a care in the world, I am asking myself what I can learn from the incident.

          God did provide. She didn’t run out the gate into the busy road. People did come to help. We did catch her. Some of my thoughts weren’t very gracious – some lacked hope and faith. I was focused on the task, and that’s OK when the task is urgent.  I don’t remember any “if You bring her back to me I will…and if You don’t bring her back to me I will…” There were no appeals to Cthulhu, Odin, high and mighty Science, or “any other god who brings her back to me.”

          I think I’d have to say that I responded correctly by going to look for her. I did show some faith because I didn’t walk away from God to find someone else to help me. I know that there are some people who claim to have walked away from their faith because something bad happened – something much worse than a run-away dog. At the same time, we’re told that there are no atheists in foxholes. We sometimes expect a traumatic experience to either produce faith or kill it. I suspect the truth is that the truth of the faith is revealed.

And what my minorly traumatic experience has shown is that I have faith, but it’s little faith. My focus was more on all of the bad things that could happen and not on God’s coming through. Oh, in the back of my mind, I knew it was likely that everything would end up fine – and it did. But my focus was on my fears.

And that makes it clear what one of the good decisions I need to make for next year is. I need to decide to focus on “the best that could happen” more and grow that sort of faith.

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