Sometime they choose you…

Over the past 2 months I have noticed movement in the woods behind our house. In particular two men who were coming and going into and out of the woods for about a week. At first I thought that maybe someone was living back there because when I went back into the woods I saw signs of life (a tarp, a lean-to shanty built from plywood and a couple of children’s chairs). I was not really happy about people living in the woods behind my house and was taking steps to see if this was really true when I realized what was really living back there was a dog. I could never get an excellent look at the dog though because it was always hiding behind a tree or the thick undergrowth and would run off every time that I approached.

This little dog kept watching us from a distance, but we could always get a glimpse of him and hear him running through the undergrowth. So I decided that I would put out some food and water for him. It was also very cold outside (around 30 degrees at night and in the 40′s during the day), so I put an old igloo dog house with some blankets just inside the woods for him to sleep in at night.

We began to see him more often, sometimes peering right into the yard from the fence line.

He seemed to be getting bolder and very very curious about my dogs, my back yard and us as a family in general…. so I decided that I was going to venture out into the woods and see if I could begin to win his trust. My daughter started this by leaving the back gate open and having a trail of food go from the woods to inside the yard. He didn’t seem that adventurous just yet.

There is a 10 foot-wide path area between the back yards and the start of the woods. I decided to sit out in this path area and just begin calling to him to come to me. This is when I started calling him Baby. I did this for a about 1 week before he began slowly coming into the clearing in front of me. He always kept his distance, but none-the-less, he was allowing me to see him. He would sit or lay about 20-30 feet from me and just watch me and watch our dogs.

This went on for about a week, then one day I decided to sit on the back door step and leave the gate open. As I was sitting there on the doorstep, in came Baby….he sniffed around and went deeper in the yard. I hopped up and closed the gate and walla, I had him! He allowed me to take a picture of him while he sat there, but you could tell that he was very afraid of me and shivered whenever I got near or touched him.

He needed a bath badly!! I pulled at least 30 ticks off of him and removed a collar that was so tight on him that it was rubbing his neck raw. I got some food and water and some nice warm blankets and put them in the back yard for him and went back to work. However, when I got home he was not in the back yard anymore…he had dug his way under the fence and was gone .

That next day our family went to Seaside Beach to relax and enjoy the day and try to let go of the fact that Baby was back out in the woods again . We had a wonderful, relaxing day. When we got home I let my dogs out in the back yard and I couldn’t believe who was there waiting for us…it was Baby! He seemed very excited to see us!

Baby loves my dogs, so I put Colbie on a leash and went out in the woods and Baby followed us right back into the yard.

That night I gave Baby about 3 baths and conditioned his fur in order to get him clean. Afterwards he smelled like coconut and looked so pretty!!

I really wasn’t looking for another dog, but I guess sometimes they choose you! Now we are looking for a name for our new Baby…I believe he’s an English Pointer

He absolutely adores my dogs – Crosby and Colbie – and I think they like him a little bit too

I think he is fitting right in to our little doggie family … but we need to figure out a better name than Baby….if you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave them in a comment

He’s still a little timid and trusts the dogs more than he trusts me, but he’s getting there! I may be the first real friendly human contact he’s known.

Does it have to Hurt?

I heard a song on the radio when I was driving to work that prompted my thinking on this subject. This is something that I’ve been mulling over in my mind for a while now, but didn’t really know how to process it. However, when this song came on the radio I began to think about this again. The song in itself is good, but there’s one line that just resounded untruth to me….the line in the song says “I don’t give until it hurts” …. that’s the part I have trouble with.

Why do we, as Christians, always seem to default our thinking to “If it doesn’t hurt we’re not doing it right?” We put unreasonable and ungodly expectations on ourselves with the thought that somehow that will make us “more righteous” or will make us more acceptable to God. This doesn’t feel or sound like grace to me!

I don’t feel that way, I don’t believe God wants me to feel that way! I believe that nothing….NOTHING…that I do will bring me into more favor with God except accepting Christ as my Savior by believing that He is the Son of God and receiving Him to be Lord of my life…..and loving God above everything else. Christ paid my debt, I don’t have to keep paying it over and over by suffering and by doing things until they hurt – IT IS ALREADY PAID! I am actually free now to love God and love people! That doesn’t hurt…loving God and loving people! Granted, some people are harder to love than others and sometimes there is a little pain involved in loving certain people….but overall, my debt is paid, I am free, I don’t have to suffer to love God, and I don’t have to suffer in doing what is right.  It doesn’t even sound godly to me because God wants us to do things with a glad and thankful heart. He wants us to do things out of the love that He has given us and therefore we have for Him. Doing anything until it hurts does not sound like love to me and actually is very selfish not selfless.

Somehow that doesn’t feel right to us, that we can get by with being forgiven and not have to work hard or suffer to obtain that forgiveness. But that is the way God set things up!

Therefore, I do not receive this thought of suffering in order to obtain as truth…I reject it! Ahhhhh, that felt good!

At the Farm

I am home most of the time, but when I do have to travel, there is only one place that I will leave my dogs…it’s at Doggie Heaven Maxamillion Farms . Here the dogs roam & play together in a 2 acre, fenced-in yard all day long and are boarded at night in the horse stables. My dogs love it there and I don’t have to feel guilty that they are stuck in a 6×4 ft. run all day long! In fact, they love it so much that they barely want to come back home – lol. When they do get home, they have had so much fun that they sleep for the first 24 hours…haha. Here are some pictures from their adventures “at the farm” …

My Newest Addition…

Colbie is my newest doggie. I believe she is a Border Collie/Australian Shepherd mix. I  had a DNA test done on her, but the results have not come back yet. She came to us from Tennessee where she was living up on a mountain, just outside of Rhea County, with a pack of 50 – 75 other dogs. The shelter in Rhea County goes up there once a month and brings down some of the dogs to try to adopt them out. I got her through Urgent Animals at Rhea County .  She is such a sweetheart and her and Crosby have become fast friends! Welcome to our family, Colbie

This was Colbie (named “My Girl” then) in the Shelter…

Bringing Colbie home from Tennessee

Good Morning!

Colbie’s new toy after her first visit to the vet…

Colbie got spayed…here she is with Saint Caffrey

Colbie, learning to sit

She’s very content with us

Happy Girl!

We’re so happy she has joined our family! Her and Crosby are good friends now and play almost nonstop together! I love my little doggie family!

Crosby & Colbie playing

Crosby, Oh Crosby!

I totally understand how Crosby (my rescue dog) became a stray…(not excusing his previous owners, because if he got out of the yard they should have searched until they found him… but…). Crosby likes to go out at 5 in the morning – sometimes – so I let him out and went back to bed … Well I guess it thundered (I didn’t hear it) but Crosby did!

Next thing I know, my neighbor is knocking on my door. I open my door and there sits Crosby on my front porch. Crosby quickly enters my house while I say to the neighbor “Oh my, where’d you find him?” He said “I didn’t find him, I was driving by on my way to work and I saw him coming around the side of your house, so I stopped my truck and rang your doorbell.” I thanked him profusely and closed the door. This guy is the owner of two huge brown labs, so he knows how it feels to have your dog escape your yard . Crosby was so glad to be in the house and panted heavily for the next 30 minutes. I guess he had put quite an effort into trying to get inside the house…I wish he would have just barked or something.

Later that day I inspected the fencing to see where he could have gotten out and realized that there were no dug up places, no broken fence areas…the only place he could have gotten out was to climb the fence at the gate. The rest of my wooden fence has the smooth boards facing inward, so he couldn’t climb there. However, the gates have cross boards where he could get a footing to climb. Crosby had climbed my 6 foot gate to get out of the back yard and was looking for an alternative way to get into the house!

So, my next project (like I needed another one) will be to screw the boards on the inside of the gates so he cannot climb them.

Crosby, oh Crosby…I find myself saying that alot these days because we have had non-stop thunder storms. Crosby is deathly afraid of thunder and lightening…probably from the time he spent as a stray out in the Florida storms, which are a respecter of NO ONE. Poor fella…so I’m working hard to ease his mind and let him know there is nothing to fear when he’s in the house with a thundershirt, doggie music and sedatives .

But even with all the extra work he has added to my life, I wouldn’t trade him for the world! He’s a sweet, cuddly, loving, beautiful, goofy, gentle giant who I absolutely adore…and who takes up most of my queen-sized bed when he lays on it. Jazmin, my border collie is loving him more and more every week. They are becomimg fast friends.

My Turn on the Chick fil a fb fiasco

I don’t have much to say about the actual incident with Chick fil a except the following:

1. I believe in Freedom of Speech.
2. I believe a business shoud be able to state their personal beliefs without threat from a city, state or govenment level shutdown.
3. I believe the personal opinions and faith-based beliefs of Mr. Cathy were blown way out of proportion by some people with a “hatred agenda” and that Mr. Cathy had every right to believe however he wanted to without fear of being shut down for his opinions or beliefs.

However, how I feel about what transpired on facebook as a result of this whole thing is another story…
1. I saw lots of (to use the words of a good friend of mine) ‘arrogant “let’s show ‘em”‘ attitudes about the so called victory that was won.
2. I saw lots of hatred towards gay people in the comments going around fb…
3. I don’t see this as a victory, but as a stumbling block because in our arrogant pride, swinging our “swords of victory”, we have simply accomplished making people never really want to get to know this Jesus (my Jesus) who now seems, to a world of wounded people, more of an angry warrior who is more concerned with victory than mercy…with putting up barriers than with Grace. Where is the hope in an angry warrior…misrepresentation!
4. To me this is a sad and embarrassing day for Christians … at least on fb … because we may have won the battle to keep a business open and free speech alive, but closed the door to a lost and dying world. A world who needs to know the same Grace and Mercy that was shown to us and that is still shown to us every day. A world that needed to feel and know the love of Jesus more than they need justice for a business or justice for speech. That world is at the end of our judgemental, pointing fingers.
5. I am embarrassed that the hatred and the pride and the arrogance were tied to Christianity…so much so I no longer wish to call myself a Christian. I will call myself a follower and believer in Jesus Christ from now on. I feel we are called by Christ to be His hands and His feet to a lost and dying world…did we so quickly forget His mercy to us, His grace to us, His forgiveness to us? Have we forgotten that we are nothing more than sinners saved by grace?
6. Today I hang my head in shame of the name Christian because of how I saw Christians misrepresenting Christ over this issue. This is NOT loving well.

If Only….

My song for the day ….