Preaching gospel to myself, as I do my best to walk by faith and not by sight. Trying with all my might to see the beauty and to hold on to hope. In doing so, I am so very grateful for music, which touches the soul, like a fresh rain on a hot day.

  And as I drove home today,....with the icy hand of anxiety slowly squeezing my heart, a song began to play on the radio and the words cut through the ice and the tears fall like rain..... And I lifted up my voice up and sang with everything in me. 

 You are my joy, You are my song

You are the well, the One I'm drawing from
You are my refuge, my whole life long
Where else would I go?

  About three weeks ago I took on the challenge of one little female pit-bull. Her rescue name is Appie but we call her Little Blue Dog.

  She came up from a shelter down south where a kind, soft spoken lady who is excellent with dogs had been unable to reach her. For some weird reason (I think it was meant to be this way) when she arrived at the rescue she came out of her kennel, wagged her tail and took a treat, ensuring her adoptability. That was the first and last time that she did so.

 After arriving she began to shut down. She would not leave the dog house and was terrified of everyone.  The rescue kennels are a very active place with a lot of dogs and a lot of noise. We assumed she was just having a hard time adjusting to it all and decided to move her to my house.

 I wrongly assumed that this would be just like all the other fearful dogs I have worked with, a little love, a little kindness and everything would be fine..... but it wasn’t. Nothing broke through her barriers. I was kind, I moved slow, I was patient. Chicken liver and black forest ham rained from the sky whenever I was around. I practiced appeasement and calming gestures that have worked well with fearful dogs in the past.  I would sit in her kennel and read just to get her used to me, never looking at her and always speaking soft yet confident. After three weeks although we had made some small progress it really wasn’t much.

 If she is loose she will run, she always runs at my approach, at anyone’s approach. If in her kennel or crate she hovers in the back and will only come out when the leash is attached to her collar. If inside she typically will hide inside her crate. Only one day, out of all the days did she come out and chew on a toy and just lay on the carpet. If you stand or move in any way she cringes and runs, if flight is not an option she goes down low, real low and awaits the displeasure that she is certain is coming.

   Once she is on a leash she will follow you, but she cringes at every move and seems to just be resigned to her fate and certain that you intend her harm.

 At certain points along the way she has been so shut down that she squints her eyes shut and just lays there as you touch her to put the leash on. Soft and gentle touch offers her no comfort and she just tenses up and allows it, certain that it is all a lie and harm is sure to follow.

 From time to time, and for only a fleeting moment, I see hope in her eyes, or something that I cannot quite put my finger on. If I sit down sometimes she will approach me, and if I walk about the yard sometimes she will follow and on occasion come up behind to sniff me, quickly fleeing if my head turns or I give any indication that I know she is there.

 She loves Patronus, my amazing Dog Whisperer dog. Through him I have been able to see a portion of her true self, as she greets him in the morning and dances in delight. For him her tail wags, for him she rains kisses, for him she bows and entices him to play. These moments are precious and beautiful to behold, for they show her as she was meant to be, as she was created to be, before some unknown sorrow broke her heart and spirit into fractured pieces.

 Working with her is heartbreaking. I have so much to offer her. Peace, rest, provision and a lot of love. I think of how it would be to have her in my lap and give her cuddles and rub her tummy….but to her this would be torturous. She simply cannot see all that I have to offer her for fear of some cruelty. I know not what she has endured in her short life, but whatever it was it has scarred her terribly.

 The lessons she teaches me are painful ones, not the normal happy and uplifting ones that other foster dogs have taught. She teaches me of sorrow, fears, hopelessness and brokenness, a tormented creature lost in the darkness. I see in her my own plight at certain times of my life, when God wooed me with His grace and mercy but I was so broken, so angry and fearful that I could not accept His wooing. Yet He never stopped pursuing me. I, like her ate crumbs from the ground when a feast beyond measure was there for the taking. I was just too broken to see it, and too disillusioned to believe it was real.

 Sometimes broken cannot be fixed, sometimes broken just will not come to the table offered. Yet God in His great mercy never stops asking, never stops pursuing, and never stops loving. I will do my very best to do the same, for the Little Blue Dog and in so doing, I will hope with all my heart that she will reach a place of trust where she will decide to eat from the bountiful table that is offered and know the peace of companionship with a caring human.

 Your prayers for her are greatly appreciated.

Little Blue Dog

I watch you huddled in the corner

Your eyes carefully watching my every move

Your body is tense, your tail tucked tightly

You are ready to flee…always ready to flee

Softness does not break through

Kindness and soft words do not penetrate

Tasty food has no appeal

You are convinced that nothing good comes from humans

Goodness and humans are a lie

I think you once believed that such things could be

I think your heart wanted it so very much

But someone trampled upon all that

And left you shattered and broken

Let me show you that beautiful is possible

Let me show you what grace can do.

Trust me little one…..trust me just a little bit

And we will behold the miracle of love.

 “Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life” (Psalm 23:6a, The Message)

“But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.” (Romans 5:8 NLT)

  After the recent loss of my beloved Hektor, the Dogo Argentino I decided to foster dogs for awhile. I wanted to give back to the dog world some of the grace I have received over the years from a variety of good dogs. Fostering enables me to help dogs in need, and it helps me in many ways to deal with the grief of losing my dear friend Hektor. 

 So enters Einstein into my life. He entered a bit quicker than I wanted, but the need was there so I said yes and brought him home. When I first laid eyes upon Einstein he was sitting in the back seat of the vehicle of the nice rescue lady who had picked him up that day. The story I know of his life prior to this moment is that he was picked up as a stray, and the animal control officer who picked him up decided to keep him, but things didn't work out due to his male dog's refusal to accept Einstein. So he came to a local rescue called Pet-A-Bull. He was there for a bit, living amongst a horde of rescued pit bulls until he was adopted by some lady. I do not know how long he was with her, only that she had returned him that day, saying he was a great dog, but he was too rambunctious for her.

  The rescue really wanted him to be able to go into a foster home, and to not have to go back to a kennel at the rescue. I can see now, after getting to know him a bit why that was so important. Einstein is not the kind of dog who does well in a kennel.

  The little guy sitting in the backseat looks scared. How scary it must be to live your life at the whims of humans. Imagine yourself dropped tomorrow in some far away country where no one speaks your language and to be dropped there without any money or any means to care for yourself. People are babbling to you, waving their hands about, talking louder as you fail to understand their words. How scary that would be.

 Einstein was frightened, he was uncertain, he had no idea what was going on or where he might be headed. He was doing his best to trust people, for he is a lover of humans, but you could see in his eyes that he was worried. My heart broke as it always does when I see an animal in need.

 I transferred him to my vehicle along with his supply of dog food and off we went for home. I didn't ask much of him. I just talked softly about nothing much at all, telling him all would be well and that he was safe. He did not understand my words, but I think my quiet speech gave him some measure of relief. Still the little guy was apprehensive. After all, he had heard kind words from folks before, but things hadn't turned out like he had hoped.

 We arrived at home and upon entering he was just so scared and so submissive that we sort of left him alone for a bit. He gravitated straight to my son Josh and huddled fearfully under his computer desk. I wondered if at some point he had given his heart to some young man like Josh, for he seemed to think that safety was to be found right there under that desk.

 We gave him that entire afternoon to just settle in, only breaking his peace with potty breaks and even those were traumatic for him. He was afraid of the patio door and he slipped on the tile floor, giving me that look of betrayal as if I had set him up to fall. My heart went out to this little dog, written all over him was the desire to love and trust, the desire to be loved and trusted, and yet he was afraid. He had lost a lot in a very short time. Been saved from the life of a stray, met up with someone who wanted to love him but had to turn him into rescue, gotten slightly adjusted to the hordes of dogs at the rescue, then he had been invited into the home of the lady.....now here he was, in another strange place, with another lady, a lady talking softly and telling him everything was going to be okay........perhaps just as the last lady had.

 By the next morning he began slowly to come out of his shell, as if he had decided to dare to hope. He made a decision to just love us to death, almost desperate in his actions, like he was trying to say "I'm a good dog!, I'm such a good dog! Please love me! Please let me stay!"

  We began to go for walks and I was impressed with how quickly he responded to me and how eager and content he was to walk right there with me. I was not walking a dog, nor was I being walked by a dog....instead he and I were walking together. That's how it should be and yet I was surprised at how easily we had arrived at this state. It was Einstein's desire to be with me that made it so easy.

 He has been with me for 6 days now. He is a delightful dog. A worthy dog. This is the kind of dog that would lay right down and die for you if you were to ask him, and were he to understand that you needed him to. This is the kind of dog that wants only to be with his special person, to follow them about the house, to walk with them along country roads, to sleep with them in fluffy beds. He is friendly, he is playful, he is loyal. This is the kind of dog that wants to be with you, participate with you, and he delights in your companionship and attention. He is what I call a Velcro dog, loyal and devoted.

  Einstein is a very special dog and I pray, with all my heart I pray, that God will provide him with the quality home and person that he so deserves, and I pray that my eyes would be always open, for the lessons that God is sure to teach me during this time of caring for Einstein.

 When I watch Einstein as he plays in the yard, I see a dog that is worried. He is happy, but in his happiness he is quick to glance at me from time to time, to make certain I am still there, he is happy like a kid given an ice cream cone, but one who knows that someone might snatch it away at any moment. He is uncertain. He is a dog that has loved and lost and yet is so willing to love again. He is a good dog. I pray his person is worthy of such a dog.