Small investments for big returns...

As Maiki has begun her return to a more normal active life, it's allowed me to begin walking with the other dogs again. I had hardly seen some of them during the long weeks of Maiki's injury and enforced rest. We're still not going for walks with the whole pack, as Maiki shouldn't get too excited or run too much just yet. So we've settled into a routine of going out with just one dog at a time. At the crack of dawn, we head out to a nearby country area with Nelson and take our morning walk while the sun is rising. In the afternoon, we escape the scorching summer heat by taking a short walk in the forest with Buba. And in the evening, we wander over to the nearby park, where she can play with a few other puppies. Poor Hugo (the German Shepherd) is still missing out, as we're only able to see him now and then.... but that will change as autumn approaches.

You'd imagine that taking only short walks would have a negative impact on our kilometre count and our goal of walking 2021 km in 2021. In fact, when I checked our end-of-July total today, I was encouraged to see that we were well on target. With fewer than 200 km to go, we'll probably reach our goal by the end of September, same as we did last year. What's kept us on track this year, is that I've recorded and included all of our walks, even if they were very short ones of less than a kilometre. All of those short distances have added up to make a very encouraging total - a reminder of how even small investments, if carried out faithfully, can actually contribute to something very worthwhile.

Another thing that has drawn my attention to the value of "small investments" is some trick training that I've done with Nelson this year. I taught Nelson all the important stuff (sit, stay, come, don't pull on the lead...) when he was just a puppy, but his owners told me that he'd become a bit lazy recently, over the months of not going out with the pack. It was time to retrain some of those behaviours and I decided to stretch his brain a little bit by teaching him a couple of new tricks too. Of course, I didn't have much time available, so I was able to make an investment of only 3 minutes per day. In ten days or so, I discovered that you can teach an old dog new tricks and that even such small daily commitments can add up to make a difference. (You can see Nelson's little YouTube video by clicking here or on his photo at the top of this blog post.) 

It's got me thinking about the other areas of our lives where we might want to see change and growth, but feel that we can't really commit enough time to make a difference. Perhaps you'd like to memorise scripture, spend more time in prayer or read the Bible from cover to cover. Perhaps you've been wanting to exercise to help your physical fitness or you're studying a language and wanting to increase your vocabulary. Perhaps you've been meaning to tidy out that garage or that wardrobe but just haven't got round to making a start....  I wonder if that "big" task could actually be achieved by making a small but regular investment - maybe just three or five minutes a day. It's given me food for thought.

A new season begins at last...

Today I begin life with my new rescue dog. She’s seven and a half months old and she has some psychological and behavioural issues carried over from her previous life (where she was locked up and prevented from running or playing for many weeks on end.) In many ways, she’s a lot like the puppy I lost three months ago… except that she doesn’t have the happy, carefree personality that that puppy had; nor does she have the impressive focus and enthusiastic obedience that made the puppy so trainable and accomplished. But I’m convinced she’s going to be an amazing dog when we’ve had time to work through all of the baggage and leave this nightmare behind us.

Yes, after three months of "rest and rehabilitation," we've finally come to the point where Maiki's knee bone fracture has healed. Her mobility buggy has been a real blessing over these past weeks, but I won't be sorry to dismantle it and pack it away in a box. I'm getting kind of tired of pushing it around in this hot weather, and Maiki's getting pretty tired of being stuck in there instead of being allowed to walk on her own four legs. But we're finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Starting this weekend, we can begin getting back to "almost normal" life.

Not completely normal, because the injury was in her growth lines, and, as the growth plates don't close until a dog is a year old, the vet says it means we'll still need to be "careful" over the coming five months, until that growth line has completely closed and the bone is solid. So, we can begin going for walks again, she can start playing with other puppies again...... but no wild running and playing with bigger dogs that could hurt her, no longish walks on mountain terrain, not too much going up and down stairs.... There's also to be no walking on sand/beach for at least another couple of weeks, so we'll be well into the summer before Maiki has her first experience of seeing the sea and perhaps learning to swim.

And after the next five months of "almost normal" life, she'll be a fully grown dog and we'll finally be able to enter the season of normal life at last.

Although I was convinced that adoption was the right way to go and that this year was the right timing, I opted not to adopt a “rescue dog” in the traditional sense of the word. I didn’t feel I had the time available to dedicate to a pup that was already six or eight months old and came with the emotional baggage and behaviour issues caused by neglect or abuse. I wanted this “last puppy of my lifetime” to come to me at two months old, so that I could raise her from the beginning into a happy, healthy, well-adjusted dog.

So it's sadly ironic that Maiki’s mysterious knee injury put an end to all that, robbing both her and me of that smooth and joyful experience. While I’m thankful that she’s been slowly recovering, I realise that I now have a “rescue dog” to rehabilitate - a puppy that has been “inappropriately treated” for almost half of its lifetime, in the sense that she’s been locked up and restricted, constantly corrected; not allowed to run or play or do all the things that puppies need to do at 4-6 months old to grow physically strong and emotionally/socially well-balanced. So now she has some of the dysfunctional behaviours that typically result from that kind of mistreatment: barking, pulling on the lead, trying to chase birds (and Teddi, the cat), digging up the lawn in the park…

So, that's why I say that today I begin life with my "rescue puppy" - as we start to undo all the negative consequences of these difficult three months. It'll take some patience and perseverance, but I know she'll turn out great.

Watching and waiting

It seems like I’ve had to do a lot of waiting this year - waiting for my residency and health cards, waiting for my puppy to heal from a serious injury….. Several of my missionary friends here are also in a waiting season at the moment. 

It reminded me of a previous waiting season, when I did a word study of all the verses in the Bible that speak about waiting, and I checked what the original Hebrew and Greek words actually meant. I wrote about it here on this blog in 2007. One verse that stood out at the time was Micah 7:7 - “And so I will watch for the Lord; I will wait confidently for the God of my salvation.”

The two words used here (watching and waiting) are the Hebrew verbs tsâphâh and yâchal. Both of them express the idea of trusting God completely and waiting patiently and expectantly for Him to speak or act. But it was interesting to note that the Hebrew dictionary also defined tsâphâh as, to lean forward, to peer into the distance, to look up or to keep watch.

These twin ideas of looking up and also peering into the distance suggested to me that really trusting God sometimes also includes waiting for things that can’t yet be seen - things you're hoping and praying for, but you have no guarantee of when they'll happen. All we can do is keep on looking up to the Lord during that waiting time. We may not have a promise that specifies a time frame, but we do know that God is good and will be with us in our challenging times of waiting.

A mixed and muddled month...

So, another whole month has gone by - several more weeks of "life on hold" for this little puppy who's not allowed to be a pup any more because of the broken bone in her knee. 

It's been kind of a chaotic month. As well as taking Maiki to Malaga three times a week for her laser therapy (see photo below), I was teaching for two weeks in a youth ministry school (in Switzerland, but by Zoom) and I had builders and painters working noisily in my house for several of those weeks. I also got bronchitis twice, which meant having two covid tests - both negative, of course. I had to put the cat (Tobi) to sleep because she had a tumour and was starting to get like a skeleton. And, just in case life got boring, I had a flood in the house that left all the bedrooms under three or four inches of water!

All of this was the slightly crazy backdrop to Maiki's second month of being an invalid. She turned six months old during those weeks, but of course she hasn't been allowed to run or play like a real puppy since that fateful morning in early May when she woke up with a mysterious limp. So it's been lockdown and restrictions for this unfortunate little border collie. If you click on either of the photos in this post, you can see a video of what the past few weeks have been like. 

Nothing much happens in the video, just as nothing much has been allowed to happen in her life recently. But you'll see how she gets her laser treatment at the hospital and how we later managed to get out and about in the town again, thanks to the "mobility buggy" that was made possible by some generous donations. That was a blessing for Maiki as it allowed her to see something more than the four walls of my bedroom, and a blessing for me, as it allowed me to go walking and get some exercise again.

So, after two months that have seemed very long (it was, in fact, a whole third of her short lifetime) we're coming to the moment of truth and tomorrow she has another evaluation at the hospital. It will be our time to find out whether her bone has healed well and whether this little pup, and her owner, can begin to go back to normal life again.