...

If you give a dog a bath towel,

She will do one of three things: 

she will lay on it

 she will ignore it

 or she will eat it

It doesn't matter why you gave it to her...

even if it was only to give her a soft place to sleep.

It doesn't matter, because she'll do whatever in the world she wants to do with it.

We found this out the hard way this week-

so I'm passing this tip on to you...

If you have an 8 month old, 45 pound Labrador Retriever in your house,

you may want to consider hiding all your towels

do what you want, but you've been warned

You may find out, like us, that your pup needs only a few minutes alone to devour the thing to shreds and ingest it deep into her stomach where it will lay 

and refuse to come back out...

In short, this is what might happen if you find yourself in the very same situation some day...

You, too, may find yourself cleaning up vomit all over the house,

and driving to the vet's office for a simple diagnosis...

only to find out there is nothing at all simple about the procedure

and before you know it, your chewing-princess is settled into a three nights stay at the Pet Spa

...and at the end of those three days, if the princess hasn't pooped the glob of towel and string out

you may find yourself signing your life away on a dotted line and giving the okay to perform a surgery, all the while knowing it's going to cost the equivalent of a small kingdom to pay it off.

And you may find that when you show up at the Vet's office just after the surgery, 

there will be two baggies filled with the gooey stomach remains - just for you

And your children will probably need therapy because you make them pose with those  remains...

 you'll have to admit, that your dog could win prizes for eating the stupidest things...

and refusing to poop them out.

And when you go to the back room to visit the patient, 

chances are she will greet you looking just like this...

all drugged up and wearing the cone of Shame

 and she'll probably try to escape so she can come home where she belongs...

 and just about the time you think things are about to go back to normal, 

the Vet will inform you that the surgery calls for a celebratory bland diet for 3 days.

If it happens to you, you'll be glad that someone knew how to help the princess out...

but when you're standing over the stove on the hottest day of the year making this

 and bagging them into meal-size proportions...

you might start to wonder how you got here.

And then you'll remember how quiet it was around your house without the four-legged K9...

and wish you could just start your week over

without the towel

and the payments that will be spread over several years...

but you'll be grateful when the ordeal is over 

and remind yourself that tomorrow is a new day...

The cycle of LIFE...

A friend of mine recently asked why I have not been blogging. And while I grappled for a good answer to give her, and came up with some pretty valid excuses that included things like busyness, and graduations, and work and such....the truth is, there is more to it than a neat little answer could explain.  I'm not sure I am ready to go into it all...actually, I'm not sure I even understand it myself.  Because, while all of the answers above are true and valid...it is deeper than all of that, and I'm not sure that anyone on the other side of this screen would really care to "go there"! 

Some days I sit here to write, and realize that what I have to say doesn't sound poetic or funny or entertaining at all.  Its sounds more like questioning and wrestling and a bunch of other words that sound more like struggle than anything else.  So I don't write...mostly because I don't want the questions and wrestling to come out sounding like things are in upheaval or out of control.  And I don't write because so much of it is deeply personal and just needs to be worked out between me and God.

But the thing is this, there's a lot of LIFE happening around here.  Because LIFE doesn't stop for you to ask questions and wait for answers.  You just have to keep going, because if you don't, you will have missed something of significance and never have the chance again.  

THIS is some of what LIFE has been doing around here lately:

This one has moved out 

{here he is, enjoying his last morning at HOME}

and his new bachelor pad home

and again, on his first grocery trip

She continues to grow

and chew...

and eat...

They goof off

He has graduated

{mmmhmmm...}

She has finished her first year of high school...

scored her first job, opened a checking account...

...and reminds me often that she will soon be old enough to drive.

There are deep questions being asked inside me...questions I rarely voice audibly, but have been there for many years.  Not questions of Faith or of Trust...just questions with unseen answers.  The questions lie dormant for clusters of days.  Inevitably, they return without warning, as was the case this morning.

Who knew that reading about Adam and Eve would put to orbit
 those nagging questions that cycle around me?
But, it started with reading a few words,
and ended with my journaling a few more words that looked something like this:


"Somewhere along the line, perfection just wasn't enough...because there was this tree that was off limits...and Eve didn't like that there was something she was not allowed to have.  How like us.  She had it all...and "all" was just not enough when she realized that there was actually more to have.  And so she gave in to her ingratitude and her longing for more...she took what was not hers and sin entered the lives of all of us.  Forever.


...SO we labor and we sweat, we have conflict, we battle with discontentment.  We wish for what we don't have, and are ungrateful for what we do.
  And life is hard...not at all the way it was created to be.  But we did it to ourselves.  And if not Adam and Eve, then it would have been someone else.  It would have been me.  Because I am just like Eve in so many ways. Having been blessed with much, I still want more.  Not in tangible things...in stuff...but in life.  I don't want ONLY what I have...I want what I have, plus more.  Not LESS than what I have...just added-to.  


And the cycle of Eve continues through me.  Unless I learn from her failures and live with gratitude in the here and now.  Because if I look at tomorrow...it's not enough.  If I look even farther...my heart panics."


There you have it...just a little bit of the ugly truth that battles inside of me.  The nagging questions of -how life got to be this way...why do I find myself still walking through life single...how is all of this wonderful life that is mine STILL not enough?  

Funny thing is, just thinking and wondering about these same questions hasn't changed or resolved ANYthing.  The questions still remain, just like they did the last time I asked them.  So I'll do the same thing I did when I discovered the same thing the last time I asked the same thing {smile}....I will resolve to stop asking today.  And I will resolve to just keep walking forward.  And I'll read and reread what I have already penned in permanent ink:

"And today...the only words that whisper Hope my way are these: 

"Be Still...know that I AM GOD."

No definitive answer.

No resolution.

Just a whisper of knowing...that He gets it....and He is still God.  

And apparently that is all I need to know."

{* Note to my friend who dared to ask why I am not blogging....sorry, YOU asked me!}