My husband, Jerry,
was out of town, so I planned to see a community theater production of “Beauty and the Beast.”
Lucy, our sweet lab, has escaped several times by climbing the fence in the
backyard. I didn’t want to take a chance
in leaving her out there with the possibility she might escape and get lost
while I was gone, so as we’ve done many times, I left her in the house to hang
out with the cats until I returned. I put the usual items she might chew out
of reach (like the TV remote) and headed out. She's always been fine.
The production was stunning, and I left singing “’Beauty and
the Beast” under my breath. What I didn’t know is our own little beast had a
surprise for me on my return.
What are those rainbow colors all over her bed?
About eight tubes of artist’s oil paint. She had a special
affinity for ultramarine blue as she decimated two tubes of it.
Then after she ruined her bed, she didn’t want to sleep in
it and climbed onto a chair, which is documented by the colorful paw prints she
left on the upholstery.
Yeah, I know, it’s my fault for leaving the tubes in reach,
but it never occurred to me that our sweet dog would do such a thing.
I dropped to my hands and knees with Turpenoid and tried to
scrub the paint off the rug in the den.
As I scrubbed, I thought Lucy is a really good dog, but I
guessed even she still has her moments.
And I thought of those words from the play, “. . . tale as
old as time . . .”
Solomon may have said it best, that there’s “. . . nothing
new under the sun . . . “ (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
Dogs have always chewed things, and my good dog is no
exception.
In the same way, no matter who we are, or how far we’ve come
with the Lord, we still have the capacity to err, to step out of God’s purpose
for our lives. And thinking otherwise reminds me of something Oswald Chambers
said, “Unguarded strength is double weakness.”
Additionally, the more we zero in on what God has for us,
the more the enemy targets us and tries to derail us. He will use any tool in
his box to do it, and especially likes to use the powerful ones, fear and doubt.
Sometimes in the spirit, it seems we are right on God’s
purpose, but in the natural, everything seems to be unraveling. And it all
looks so I.M.P.O.S.S.I.B.L.E. That’s when an avalanche of anxiety may overwhelm.
It’s also when we can choose to remember what He has poured
into us and why the early church “rehearsed all that God had done with them” (Acts14:27 KJV),
because of the times in which they
lived, in the face of extreme opposition, it helped to remember God’s
faithfulness. We remember that if we don’t guard our hearts and cling to the
Lord and His word, we can wind up chewing up a few tubes of oil paint and
making a big mess like my sweet dog Lucy.
And once that paint is out of the tube, well, do I have to
say it? It’s not going back in.
I’m a bit short on paint for a project I intended to
start this week. But on the other hand, even as we begin this process of getting a film into production, I’ve gained a strong reminder to not allow
the enemy of my soul to move me away from God’s purpose, no matter how
difficult the road.