Seeing God Thru Your Dog

Sometimes when I struggle to understand an issue concerning God, I think about our human relationship with the world’s greatest animal, the dog.

Man, I love dogs. I love everything about dogs. Just watching the slack-jawed way they bumble through life makes me laugh. It is not an understatement to say that dogs are one of the great joys of my life, and very few things fill my heart more than watching dogs playing with each other. And perhaps, just perhaps, God’s relationship with humans is like a dog-lovers relationship with dogs.

Imagine, first of all, a room full of puppies, and they all belong to you. Wouldn’t the sight of them fill you with love and happiness? You wouldn’t really expect much of them in the big scheme of things because, well, they are dogs, but you’d love them anyway. You’d watch them do their knuckleheaded antics, and you’d smile, and you’d feel good knowing you were going to provide for them. All you’d expect from them in return would be love, and some minor obedience.

And this makes me wonder, sometimes: Does God look at us humans similarly? Does He watch us in His brilliance and perfection and say, “They ain’t perfect, but they’re mine, and love I them. They make me happy.”

Also, consider this: We dog lovers do plenty of things to our dogs for which we have a “morally sufficient reason,” which the dog finds horrifying nonetheless.

Ever been neutered? Didn’t think so. But even the most ardent dog lover will subject their beloved pet to this procedure because “it’s for a good reason.” Think your dog understands this higher reasoning? Me neither. So let’s ask ourselves this: Is this the sort of thing that God has to go through when dealing with suffering and evil in the world? That He hates evil too, but allows it to happen for a “morally sufficient reason” that we cannot understand?

What about when a dog that’s never caused you a lick of trouble bites the neighbor’s kid in the face? It’s your dog, but is it your fault? (Television lawyers need not answer the previous question). Aren’t you sad that it happened? Could you have avoided it? Sure, you could’ve put the dog to sleep when it grew teeth. You didn’t, however, because you hoped the dog would live a good and loving life. Is it possible that God views us the same way, knowing full well that we all have the potential to be good and loving people?

Understandably, many folks object to my dog analogies because they’re too simplistic-- but wouldn’t the same idea stand up if we were talking about parents and their little children? It’s really the same thing: The parent sees and understands a big picture that the child does not. Because of this, the kids are not allowed to sword fight with knives, and are required to go to the doctor for painful shots, whether they like it or not. The parent understands realities the child doesn’t, so the parent gets stuck being the heavy. You’ve no doubt seen the parent who tries to be a “best friend” instead of a parent…does it work? Nope. Perhaps God operates within similar parameters.

I think we’re all guilty, at one time or another, of thinking of God as a really, really, really smart and wise entity who sees the world much as we do. And that’s the real point where my dog analogies fall apart. Why? Because I’m trying to see and understand the world through the eyes of the God who invented all things, and it’s not possible to do so.

Yes, the dog analogies help me get a glimpse of the complexities, but the fact is that the realities of the universe are way over our human brains, and trying to think them through armed with only human logic is like taking on a grizzly bear with a pen knife.

Consider even the simplest of issues: God has been around forever. We humans can’t even fathom the word forever. If you had the time span represented by “forever,” you could individually number every grain of sand on every beach in the world. And you could build a museum to house each grain of sand on the East Coast. By yourself. Without tools. Sounds impossible? If you had forever, you’d have it done before your morning coffee.

Because we are human, and cannot stand our inability to comprehend concepts like the concept of forever, we try to think our way out of it. We’ve even come up with the theory that the universe has an edge, and there’s a non-universe that it’s expanding into.

Really? Are there signs at the edge that say “There Be Dragons Here”? The hard fact is that we humans hate confronting issues where our logic fails us, and thus we tend to reduce these issues to vague scientific theory. We simply cannot see the universe through God’s eyes, so we stubbornly attempt to force square pegs into the round holes.

So… is it possible we can better understand God’s relationship with us by considering our relationship with our dogs? Perhaps, in limited cases. There is, however, one really big difference: Our dogs love us no matter what.