Other than eating, sleeping and racing outside to bark at imaginary burglars, my dogs’ favorite pastime seems to be play fighting. Ellie and Frankie (our Chihuahuas) do it the most, growling and biting at each other in that tentative, slow way dogs do when they aren’t really mad at each other. Chloe joins in occasionally and even Sandy will have an amusing play fight with Frankie, who is small enough that Sandy could easily swallow him in one gulp. Only Cody refrains from it. Cody we got as a stray when he was about 2 and since he’s male, he is still unsure of himself in the family, and suffers…

It still amazes me how calmly our dogs accept double standards. Now, I understand how they can accept different standards between humans and dogs, but they also, very calmly, accepted different standards between dogs. Sandy is a Chocolate lab, and somewhat big. Cody is some sort of terrier mix and just on the upper side of what would be considered a lap dog. Chloe is also some odd mix and is just a little bit smaller that Cody. Our two Chihuahua’s, Ellie and Frankie, are of course small. Sandy is not allowed on any furniture at all. The other four are allowed on the couches. Cody and Chloe, while allowed…

Like an explosion all 5 dogs will rush up from where they are laying and with loud barks hurl themselves to the dog door into the yard. The racket they make is almost thunderous and it blocks out every other sound in the room until they finally get outside. They do this maybe a half-a-dozen times each night as we watch TV. My oldest complains almost every single time and sometimes even yells at them. It can be very annoying, but I know that they see their job as protectors of the family, and showing a strong front to any and all potential intruders is part of their duty and…

I’ve never been able to teach our dogs to be patient, or altruistic when it comes to food. We feed them enough because several of them are having some mild weight problems. We did feed them out of one bowl, but we notice some were getting skinny (namely the two males) while the rest were gaining weight. So we got them all food bowls and if we watch and re-enforce the rules, they will each eat out of their own bowls. If not, then it’s just a free for all. Now our dogs are really all that selfish when it comes to many things. They eagerly exercise their roles as…

This is Frankie. He wants to be petted. He does this about once every half hour or so. He puts his little front paws on my leg then stares at me with his sorrowful, little, puppy-dog eyes until I give in, stop work, and pet him. After about 15 to 20 seconds of petting him, I stop, tell him that’s enough, he looks at me for a while to see if I’ll pet him some more, then he’ll run off to play somewhere else. I’ve thought about what this tells me about our relationship to God. Petting a dog is an act of affirmation. The stroking to them is like…

Today I tried teaching Frankie and Ellie to fetch. They’re Chihuahuas so I didn’t know if they’d be able to get the process as easily as Sandy, our chocolate lab, did. I threw one of their toys and Ellie eagerly ran after it, but then stopped half-way back to play with it. She eventually brought it near me, so I took it and threw it again, and again she eagerly ran after it, but wandered around with it, instead of bringing it back. I finally gave up. So, it occurred to me that the problem was that Ellie wasn’t connecting me throwing the toy, with her enjoyment of running after…

I thought occurred to me a while back that God has left a whole lot of metaphors scattered about our world. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if absolutely everything in this world was an intentional metaphor for something far more worthwhile in eternity. So I thought about dogs. I like dogs, I always have. And I wondered if our relationship with dogs was a metaphor for something. The relationship between a husband and wife is a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the Church, so why not. The more I thought about it, and the more I watched our dogs, the more it became obvious to me that…