Getting the Bugs Out

This is Bugs (hi Bugs). Bugs is one of the few dogs that is allowed off-leash priviledges while at the kennel. He loves to run around the pond, take a quick dip, then roll in the grass.

The problem is that Bugs has come to expect this treatment each time the dogs go out. Since that's four times a day, he often has to go out with the rest of the dogs to the outside fenced in area. Yet Bugs goes to the door that leads to the Great Outdoors and looks at me expectently.

Sometimes, Bugs wins.

Every now and then, a prayer gets answered in the way I'd hoped. Then I think I had something to do with it. Like I had some secret power and it was all me.

Wrong.

Can prayer sway the hand of God when He's already working with His perfect will? Certainly there are instances in the Bible when this seems to have been the case. "God changes His mind." Theology aside, it's much more certain that prayer changes US. Because of this, it is a valuable and worthwhile endeavor.

How many times have I prayed for God to change some Meany only to have my own heart changed toward that person. God's sneaky that way.

The potential problem for me is to somehow expect that the Lord is always going to listen to me and I get my way. There is just simply more to the universe and how God's plan works than what I can understand.

And I don't like that. I'm like Bugs looking at the door to have access to the Great Outdoors, only to have to be shuffled off to the boring other area.

Eventually I will understand how this whole crazy world works, and how I'm important to God, yet only a finite human in a huge world of generations and cultures. It's wondrous.

The day I'll understand will also be the day when I am set loose forever in the Great Outdoors that only a creative God orchestrated. A dip in the pond of Living Waters will be the ultimate peace through a confusing world.

Now, if only I can remember that while I stand at the door expectently.