Washing Your Dog

I’m not quite sure what it is about the scent of rotting animal carcass that makes a dog drop uncontrollably to the ground, and begin grinding her back against it, but it happens.  There’s something about dogs that love filth and stink.  It’s an instinct that makes rational people become completely irrational.  Well, at least the smell is.

So, then you have to wash your dog.  Which, when I was growing up and had a bigger dog, involved the hose, but now that I have my own house and two little dogs… it involves the tub, at least three towels, and patience that I don’t have.

Now, don’t get me wrong, our dogs are cute.  I’ve been told they’re the kind of cute that “only parents could love.”  That kind of “Awww” cute where the person saying it feels bad for the dog so much that they suddenly become cute right there on the spot.  Our newest one, Lady Deathstrike (on the right) looks like an Ewok up close.  And, you can say what you will, but our dogs are cute, fun and generally good.

But, dogs in general have something about them that revels in the idea of stink and filth.  Our dogs think that real hooves are the best thing in the world and will fight over them like we won’t buy more.  If you’ve never gotten hooves for your dog, or don’t have a dog, hooves smell like crap.  Honest to God crap.  Almost as if they’ve been penetrated by the smell of farm crapping yards for so long that the smell has survived the animal…  I’m not sure what it is about hooves, but our dogs like them, and it keeps them busy for long periods of time… so the smell is worth the occasional irrational reaction by me or Mary saying, “Okay, who pooped?” only to find they’re just eating hooves.

Not only do they love stink and filth, but they hate being clean.  Every dog I’ve ever been close to, pretty much the second you release them from the drying stages of a bath, they begin a frantic search looking for something that stinks to get re-acclimated with their surroundings.  I can picture our eldest (ha!  1.5 years…) dog, Cerberus (I love my wife!), wandering the house talking to herself.  Man, I’ve been building up that scent for weeks!  And they just erase it!  No regard for my feelings on the matter!

But then, as we let them go from their most recent bath on Saturday, I began to think about it.  We do the same sort of thing.  Don’t we?

We wander around, rubbing the world all over ourselves in an effort to build up this sense of “ourselves” or “identity”.  Finding things that will define who we are.  Just racking up a scent so everyone will know who we are and what we do.  A scent we can smell.  Things we can see, hear, touch and taste.

And then, God comes along and says, “Bath time” and we cower under the proverbial bed because we don’t want it go be erased.  As if all of those things and scents made up who we are.  But God created us in His image, with the free will to hopefully stay clean and retain the scent that won’t define us as us, but define us as Him.

To recap:  We’re all dogs, building up our own stink so that we can be ourselves and what God really wants is for us to be close to him, and get his scent on us.  

So, Has God given you a bath lately?  Or are you afraid to lose your stink?