The Jesus Administration

UNDER REVISION

Dogs vs. Cats

Warning: This post Contains some strong language. Not much and it's more brawny than strong. But you'll forgive me, because that's what our God does. It's His nature, and it should be ours, as well.






I've always been a dog guy. It's not that I hate cats, they're cool in their oddly retarded way, but I'm a dog guy by nature. There is a photo of me in diapers pushing Mr. Salty pretzels up our dog, Duke's nose. Duke was understanding and entertaining, which is one of the multitasking talents of dogs which put me in their camp. Duke would sit patiently as I pushed the pretzel nearly half its length into his nostril before turning his head and blasting it like an edible projectile from his nose with a snort. This feat was rewarded by my uproarious laughter and a reloading of his nose. This canine awesomeness went on for hours. Although I have no recollection of the event, the one thing I am certain of is no cat would have tolerated my behavior, not for an instant. Most cats can't stomach me as an adult, and surely not as a toddler... which aside from size is still the essence of my being.

In spite of my doggy disposition, I met a kitten that I adopted as a special needs child. Honestly, I had no intention of doing any such foolish thing, but my girlfriend decided that we would, and you understand how this became my decision as well. It wasn't much of a kitten to speak of, more of a pathetic mewing sliver of dark hair. It had the misfortune of being the runt of the litter, and then rejected by it's mother. Tabitha, my girlfriend, had a mothering instinct disproportionate to her available time, hence the furry whelp became my collateral responsibility. Not old enough to have been weaned from its mother, I improvised a feeding teat using surgical gloves. While effective, latex lacks the puncture resistance natural tits enjoy, so the stench of sour Similac became my constant companion and a regular feature of my wardrobe. During those feedings I found myself not totally loathing the little beast.

What seemed years, but now I recognize as weeks, the kitty was on solid food and I was commensurately less smelly to boot. A win-win for me and my increasingly less loathsome feline friend.

Did I say, "friend"? Wow! But... I'm a dog guy. I am ambivalent towards all cat kind. Well, all cat kind less one, our little... uh. He didn't have a name. We, being Tabby, myself, and the kitten, had tried on a few names from time to time; Jen, Ninja, Snooker, Smoker, and a handful of others that stuck to the kitty as well as they have to my memory. None of them fit the furry one. It seemed a lost cause as one moniker after another came with great potential, but lost it's appeal like a bowl of milk swollen cereal neglected for hours.

At night the nameless creature in the furry black pajamas would crawl onto my chest and nuzzle it's tiny head under my chin. As I lay drifting off into another fitful pornographic dream... Out came razor sharp talons digging deeply into the tender flesh of my chest, plowing bloody furrows faster than the larger, more predatory cousins in the cat family. In howling pain I launched the claw bearing demon across the room and into a closet where it disappeared from view into a knee deep pile of clothing mixed with sex toys that Tabby would occasionally disappear into while getting dressed. My scream was punctuated by the explitive, "Lucifurry!" Simultaneously, the cat was named and I was converted once and for all to the dominion of dogs.

Yeah, I'm a dog man because dogs are loyal, trustworthy, and make great pretzel cannons. Cats, none of the above. Dependability, loyalty, and a willingness to" go the road" no matter how rocky, muddy, or misleadingly treacherous that road may be, are exclusively dog qualities which are mutually exclusive to the cat.

I believe that all my friends fall neatly into two classifications; dogs or cats. Although, both my occasionally pee on the carpet, the dog will feel guilt, remorse, and frankly so God damn sorry they will sit in the corner and look pathetic and lonesome until you offer forgiveness in the form of a skritch behind the ears. Then, all is well with the world and everyone in it.

The vile cat giving your carpet a liberal dousing of ammonia laced urine will demonstrate its disdain for the rest of your home decor by shredding it to threads.

You can love a cat, feed it, brush it, buy it all kinds of expensive toys, and gourmet food (as if there are cat gourmet chefs) that a third of the planet's human population would kill for... but without warning, without reason, or maybe just for fun, the cat will claw the shit out of you. That's the permanent asshole nature of the cat. It cannot be removed. 

Oh sure, the cat my offer its regards once in a while by dropping an equally shredded bird carcass at your feet. But the dog, he'll show you he fricken’ loves you by dropping a slobber marinated cat corpse at your feet. The enemy of my enemy is this man’s best friend.

Uhh… Aww... He'll even settle for man's second best friend!

Like I said, most friends can be placed in either Dog or Cat categories, and here's the point of this pointless penning...

Keep your Dogs and Lose your Cats.

Your life will be better for it.

O Mortal You!

As we grow older, we gradually realize that our bodies do not heal as quickly from injury, recover from exercise as rapidly, or return to health after an illness. Like looking in the mirror every day, you don't notice yourself aging until you hold a picture from your youth next to your face. This is the stealth by which age and infirmity creeps up on us all.

One day we are too young and the next we are too old. One day we are sitting in a high chair wearing a bib and being fed strained vegetables by our mother, and the next we are sitting in an a geriatric chair wearing a bib and being fed strained vegetables by our nurses aid. One day we are gazing through bright eyes at the wonders of the world and  trying to pronounce the name of all the new things we love, and the next day we are gazing through darkening eyes and wondering at all the unfamiliar faces of our children and trying to recall their names.

It should give us pause to ask, why do we invest so much time and energy into trying to build wealth and surrounding ourselves with the tokens of success which will all soon be left behind when we step across our mortal threshold? All the while overlooking the most important treasure that we can attain and offer, love. Love for others and love for God sums up the Prophets and the Law. "God is Love", declares the  very essence of the Divinity.

How many hours a week do we dedicate to experiencing a deeper relationship of love with friends, family, God, or even total strangers? I bet you know how many hours you worked last week, but you can't recall the last time you considered loving more.

Relationships are messy, entail risk, and have uncertainties that scare us from investing or accepting Love. We will readily invest our life savings, most of our waking life, and mortgage our children's futures in a futile quest to stockpile more of the stuff we can never take with us. These are transient things; our bodies, this earth, all Creation like the lilies of the field are here today and tossed into the fire tomorrow. Even the very fabric from which all material things are woven, the atom, will fall apart in due time. Yet, these are the very things we believe to be important, pressing, and fulfilling.

We take much for granted, such as our next breath until the moment you can't have it. Then, you would trade everything you thought so important for a single lung full of blessed air. In this inevitable moment, you will understand what truly matters and it won't be your car, your house, your bank account, or your equity portfolio. It won't be your neatly manicured lawn, your seniority, your pension plan, or your villa by the lake.

No, as your life flickers with the dwindling supply of oxygen in your blood stream, you will know regret, but it won't be regret for the things thing you have done, but rather regret for the things you should have done or would do if you only had a few more breaths of sweet, sweet air. If you could gulp just the tiniest pant, you could tell the people you Love how much you Love them. You would spend it all to tell them how important they have been in making this temporary world you share a better, more beautiful place. In this final mortal moment as your throat seizes shut and your chest burns hollow, you will recognize the ones you should have Loved, but didn't because you were busy chasing illusions of wealth and specters of power. In the rapidly growing darkness, as you feel your body being shucked away, you will plead with the Maker; “I will Love everyone and appreciate everything, if I could have but one more breath of air.” He will abstain from action and in that moment you will die.

Someday, not long from now, you will be right here. For one millionth of a second you will understand the futility of the word "mine", you will surrender everything to the overwhelming power of death and you will pass through the great equalizer of all mankind. 

But occasionally, after that moment when life fades to black and we confront our powerlessness, impotence, and frailty, a precious few of us get that one blessed breath reprieve. Then, another and suddenly we feel the heavy weight of our body. We feel the hard labor of breathing again. The gift of this life may not always seem so wonderful if we return to a pain ridden, decrepit body (which all of them are) but the lesson we bring back with us is what really matters.

We may soon neglect how important our next breath may be, but we will not forget what is important, what has true intrinsic value, and what matters in this mortal life and beyond before that darkness comes for us again.

The Form vs. The Function

The God Behind the Curtain

In the Garden of Eden man and woman walked with God. There was no need for religion, instead we enjoyed a genuine trust relationship with our Creator which was as close as a child walking hand in hand with their parent.

But that closeness was shattered by sin. I am sure you can recall a time in your childhood when you did something wrong of which you were so ashamed that the last thing you wanted was to be close to mom or dad?

So, just like any child who has deeply wounded their parent by violating their trust we try to distract mom or dad with innocuous and irrelevant chatter to fill the void we created.

   "Look at the birds daddy."

   "I know my ABC's"

   "Where's mama?"

What ever it takes to aliviate those deafening silences where once had been laughter. It's bargaining for the restoration of the relationship we poisoned. Yet, notice that as children we never really address the root issue. We never say,

"Hey dad, about me stealing my friends silver dollar and burying it in the back yard,  I am really sorry. It was wrong of me, and blaming the dog was ridiculous as well. You taught me better and I let you down. Will you forgive me?"

No, we're going to every length to avoid the consequences of our culpability, our guilt for failing to be good, the cost of our sin.

That was exactly how all of humanity has responded in our feble attempts to get right with God. We will pay the tithe, fill the pew, bake the cookies for the missionaries in whatever that place is called, and make our kids do everything our parents did to keep God, our Father, distracted from those very few times, and such minor things they were at that, that we screwed up. Surely, we could cajole, negotiate, or "cute" our way back to good, couldn't we?

Well, yes and no. We can be restored to our trust relationship with God but it has little to do with our fumbling, inadequate, infantile efforts, far less than we are lead to believe.

We say, "I quit drinking, chasing after the women who were left when drinks stopped being served, and then lying to her about how much I cared for her "company" in the morning. All of this I did when I became a Christian." But in truth, God was doing those works within us because we were letting Him be in charge of our lives. Picture a three year old who has just had her shoes tied by her father and immediately turns to her mother and says,

    "Look mama, I tied my shoesez."

The parents know that their beautiful little peanut had little tangible input in the shoe tying process, besides staying still long enough for dada to do it, which is no small amount of effort for any three year old.

This is how God works for and with us. He is ever mindful of our weaknesses, our lack of understanding, and our general desire to "be good", but we just don't know how. So, rather than letting dada tie our shoes, we are trying glue, staples, and maybe an occasional clump of schnauzer poop that we found on our morning walk which mama became inexplicably so worked up about, after all it did seem to be holding the laces together for a bit. In a word, God knows what we are about as smart as a salad bar, but we have a lot of potential, and that's why God loves us.

That's a really tough issue with most of us, to be acceptable to God, let alone loveable to Him. But we forget that we were Created by Him. So if we are unacceptable to our Creator, then God would be a poor craftsman.

Our God is perfect. We are merely incomplete, works in progress. When He is finished he will pull back the curtain and reveal His work.

The Man who tore the Curtain

In Memoriam of Scott Martin