Goodbye, and Thank You

     My dog died a week ago on a Monday.  It left this incredible hole in me.  I have spent hours on end sitting at the gas station chain smoking, trying to fill the hole. But this hole is much bigger than my dog.  When I got Izzy as a lonely bachelor of 29, I really had no concept of what love really was.  I cared for this little Australian Cattle Dog mix and she soon taught me to get outside of myself.  She showed true unconditional love for me, as I am, not as she would have me be, and we went through repeated hard times together as I struggled with an illness that has dogged me since I was seventeen.  She stood by me when other people couldn’t and in everything she did, she just wanted to please me.  Dogs all want a job to do.  Her job became to support me emotionally - to always be there at my feet to pet.  And to clean up after my sloppy eating.  (She loved both parts of her job equally.)  But it has dawned on me that I developed this deep mutual trust with her because of what she gave to me and because of the very insignificantly little I gave to her: (provision): food and water, walks and scratches behind the left ear.  She was filling a much bigger hole than I could ever realize.  I say we had mutual trust because I trusted her with my life in the darker times, and she trusted me with hers.  Because of this, she could come out in the un-fenced front yard with me and lay by my feet or wander around, always listening for my hand patting my hip to call her back when she strayed too far.  That kind of bond doesn’t happen overnight.  I trusted her to be gentle with my precocious toddler daughter. Izzy and I were no less than comrades and she did her absolute best until she fell in the end. There is nothing like that bond in human relationships: she molded herself into what I needed her to be, and she knew better than I what that was.  
    You see, she was helping to fill a much bigger hole in my life.  I yearn for respect and approval from others.  My father, as much as he taught me, did not teach me that I was worthy of respect at a young age.  My mother tried in her own way, but it fell on deaf ears by that time.  You see, my parents were divorced and my mother worked two jobs at times and went to school.  I was free to roam about the world as long as I was back by dinner.  I was never home.  I didn’t learn the ins and outs of being with other family members, and regular, shared family time was just not possible. Because of this I became fiercely independent.  But I have realized that now, that prior to my learning, any threat to my autonomy went directly to my core wound: if someone was telling me what to do or how to do it, I assumed subconsciously that they do not trust my judgement or respect my abilities.  They were "infringing" on my autonomy. Therefore they must not respect me, either. The core of my illness for many years was that I didn’t respect and approve of myself.  I longed for it coming from others.  This became apparent to me when I realized that I often felt that my wife did not respect me.  She actually does, deeply. It’s just that I interpret things through the lens of not respecting myself. So when she asks me something and puts constraints on it (like needing it done immediately) or worse, tries to tell me how to do it, I internalize it as her disrespecting me.  And I am the same way with her family.  They were highly dependent on each other.  In many ways their family culture was the opposite extreme of my family.  My wife, herself, says her family was intermeshed.  When this excessive interdependence is directed at me, I often get angry and frustrated. I yearn for my freedom and respect of that boundary. My dog, Izzy, thought I was the best human that ever existed.  She partially filled the hole. And, tellingly, all this stuff about respect and autonomy and interdependence occurred to me in the short time after her death while reflecting on her life. She is still teaching me so much, though now she only lives on in my heart.  Now the hole can begin to be permanently healed over - largely because of her.
    Izzy loved me unconditionally as I loved her for all those years of single life until I re-met my wife 16 years after we had briefly dated in college.  Back in college, despite the love lavished on me by my family members, I had not the faintest concept of love.  My tight bond with Izzy taught me what I had been blind to. It taught me what real love was: showing up every day, always thinking the best of someone though they give you reasons not to, maintaining the relationship, working through the hard times, focusing on myself - not on my partner's wrongs or infringements on my boundaries.  The only person we can change is ourselves, after all.  Love is holding hands through all the crap you both go through.  It takes reminding yourself of the positives of the other and turning a blind eye to the negatives, every day.  It is all so you can be there for each other.  Because in life, storms will come and one can chose not to go it alone.  But it is a choice, and there is hard work involved.  It is work to try to always see the best in our partners.  It is work to be there for someone.  It is work to re-focus on one's self and work through one's own issues that the other person's habits and lifestyle trigger in oneself. My wife and my family members and now her family members all love me like this, but I did not understand it until God’s little messenger, this unassuming 40 pound cattle dog, showed up in my life.  Slowly Izzy un-blinded me from the features at the core of love.  And when my wife and I met again, my wife could see this in me.  We dated for 3 years, were married 3 years and then had our daughter.  Our daughter is about to turn 2. My learning now is in context of a young family. So Izzy, though she passed recently, lives on in the family she helped make possible.  And she lived long enough to get to know my daughter. All this has stuff mixing around in my head has taught me something about myself and, I think, about God.
    I believe God is present in all of our relationships. I think that the fiber which runs between us and others is literally the body of God.  I believe this because I am a Christian (more or less) and I believe God is a God of relationship.  Without relationship happening, I believe we, by natural means, and God, by supernatural means, would cease to be.  How can you be the God of nobody, after all?  I am sure this particular belief about God ceasing to exist would not be popular in my camp.  But I think it is true because I think that is how important relationship is.  And that part would be widely accepted in my camp.  

    I have never have been "good" at relationships.  But with Izzy’s help, I had enough understanding to get me in on the ground floor of my own family where I continue to learn and grow.  I still have so far to go, but I believe that God experiences (aka: the presence of the Holy Spirit one can often tangibly feel) helps heal over our holes over the course of our lives though gifts to us like Izzy was for me.  This is so we no longer have to stuff things in ourselves to fill them.  But instead, we can be free of our holes, like my need for respect and validation, that hinder our relationships. Who wants to be around someone that longs for respect from them?  They’re either a wet noodle or the angry President Trump.  I don’t want to be either of those things.  Through the gift of Izzy’s relationship with me, God began to heal the hole.  It continues in the family I think she made possible.  It may take a long time. The hole seems large at present.  But now I am aware of it.  I don’t believe salvation happens in some magical minute you decide Jesus is divine.  I believe it is a process.  It is the nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty work God does on us in the real world as we go about our lives.  And especially as we go through hardships. In fact, I don’t believe Jesus was any more divine than any person can be when they’re at their God-given best.  He was just the best person at it that I know of.  I believe this was because his holes were filled by God experiences and the love of his parents early in his short life.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all had that happen?  I believe it is possible for every one of us. And Jesus believed it was possible.  My little four-legged God gift, Izzy, started the process for me. The life she gave for me is proof to me that healing our holes is possible.  God began my healing of this particular hole with the awareness of the hole Izzy’s death showed me. God gives us the gift of relationships with people and other living things to heal our holes. He does this to redeem the experiences and trials we have suffered through, the wisdom we gain from them, so that we can turn this gained wisdom towards helping others.  These gifts are our redemption. (This is a very Christian concept). Meaning what we learn from God and ourselves and from people around us when we go through trials in life redeem our faults, failures, and shortcomings, making all the crap in us into something we can use to help others. They bring us closer and closer throughout our lives to who God intended us to be: whole.  Relationship with Jesus: the living memory of him (with others) that finds its way into our hearts and his amazing wisdom are powerful gifts that help fill these holes over time.  They slowly save us over the course of our lives and redeems all the stuff we have gone through. God brings us relationships to do the work of healing us.  Somewhere early on in the history of Christian Theology, Redemption was separated from Salvation for many people. We were "saved" and going to heaven if we accepted Jesus as lord over our lives (i.e.: accepted he was divine).  I think this is a terrible bit of theology that robs the power of the Christian message to change the world. I say this because most of the world has never accepted and will never accept belief in a divine Jesus.  Ergo, in this theology, they will never be "kingdom dwellers," in the eyes of especially young Christians (meaning they are early in their spiritual walk) in the church.  And so a large part of Jesus's official church believes others who have not accepted that Jesus is divine are lost, in error, or without hope.  So this sizable contingent will always be waiting for a kingdom that will never come.  A kingdom that only comes when everyone accepts Jesus as divine.  And this influences individual churches to greater or lesser extents, depending a lot on the culture there and the pastor. The kingdom, in this mindset, has to be someplace or sometime else, so the "saved" could go there. This belief is not consistent with the words of Jesus. He said the kingdom is here now.  He came to heal those blinded by religion and set us all free to have a our own relationship with God without all the religious baggage like this.  This is the consistent repeating theme of the narrative that is the Bible up through the time of Jesus: individual people in the New Testament and the nation of Israel in The Old Testament overcoming the blindness of religion with the simple stripped down relationship with God. It is a repeating cycle every few generations as people fall away from a simple relationship with a loving God and heap on religious baggage that excludes others, only to be saved every few generations by a messiah or prophet. This is the messiah cycle that defined the religious history of the Jewish people. And it still goes on today. When we find and listen to our Messiah and/or the other messengers God sends us, the scales fall off our eyes and we wake up to living in the kingdom now. And we learn to treat others accordingly.  I believe Redemption and Salvation are one in the same.  They are two facets of the same gift. We are redeemed and saved in a process, by the the nudging's of God (and the people we meet) through all the good and bad times we go through in our lives. And the redemption that flows from this learning means we have the experiences and the wisdom to help others who are going through the same, or similar things.  That is what "redemption" means in Christianity.  The Old Testament Jewish scripture has a phrase for it, it is called "the restoration of the years the locusts have taken."  And God can do this work in anybody.  We are redeemed and saved in relationship with God.  We are saved in a process.  God molds us and shapes us into what we were meant to be. I think we are all walking around blocks of Swiss Cheese, full of holes.  God-experiences, the insight he gives us, and the relationships he brings to us, save us in a process of healing.  I think this is why the deepest longing in humans is to be loved and accepted as we are, and it is why God is portrayed in the Jewish religion as well as Christianity as the ultimate lover and perfect parent. In this relationship we develop with him, he heals over these holes in us over time.  Izzy was truly a gift from God.  She is part of his work of saving me.  She will always live on in the work God did through her.  She changed me and so she lives on in me and through me.  She lives on in our little 3 person family that she helped bring about.  She is still teaching me after she passed, even as I write this.  Much like Jesus does.  She was a true friend.  No one can ever take what she gave me.  She lives on as long as I do.  Goodbye, Izzy.  And thank you. You showed me my hole so that I could on day find wholeness. You were truly a gift from God.

(Izzy at the beach during our stay at Michigan State Campground on lake Michigan in spring 2014.)