The Puppy Memoirs

...I have a permanent travel partner for my long trips over the mountains from my home in Lexington, SC to Newport, TN where I grew up. His name is "Cash" and he is my 6 month old chocolate lab. Cash usually spends the time catching up on his Z's all except for two very distinct times during the trips. The first is just as the trip begins, though he has made the trip dozens of times now, you can see in his small brown eyes that everything is new, its exciting, and he is determined to not let anything get passed him. So many times I find myself in the exact same position as Cash. I am shook from the normality of my lifestyle and I am thrown into a fresh area, in a daze of confusion...though a slight familiarity to the whole thing. With my new surrounding my antennas are up and my eyes are keenly aware of the surrounding. Inevitably though, the new wears off and Cash ends up sulking slowly into the passenger truck seat and with a few gentle strokes behind his ears and the melodies of some Coheed and Cambria, or Mayday Parade he is off to puppy dream world. Sound familiar yet? So, my little brown friend spends the majority of the trip shifting and turning his self, mostly unaware of what is happening. Then it happens...always the same spot and with always the same enthusiasm. We crest the top of a mountain somewhere between Ashville and the promised land (Newport) and Cash jolts up out of his seat with a whole new kind of excitement. Now I don't know if it is that he can smell the finish line or if it is the massive amount of water in his small puppy bladder, but he is now completely focused in on the road in front of us. Its not like the first awareness though, that was excitement and this is something more basic, its...a yearning, an urgency...He knows the end is close. It was about this time that right beside my truck pulls a small SUV with a rather cute, yellow, slightly older female lab in the passenger seat. With as much force as I could I placed my hand over cash's head and pointed his nose straight at this lovely specimen. In his urgent state Cash's only response to my intrusion was anger. Why had I pulled his eyes away from the prize? what could possibly make me distract him from what he knew was the end of the trip? Did I not know that we were mere miles away from the end? I fought with my boy for about thirty seconds and then gave up as the yellow lab slowly drifted back behind us. During this whole ordeal Cash's total attention was on my hand in front of his face pulling him away from his focus. Okay...snap back to humanity...just like Cash the newness of my Christianity has worn off now and I'm so done being asleep at the wheel. I'm beginning to wake up and though I know the final destination, I finished with the modern Christian that presents an attitude that we are just riding out this world to the end. No, I am not going to be aggravated by the hand that's turning my head to the world around me, I am going to see where it is pointing...I'm done focusing on end because I already know it has been set. My focus is on the hurting, perishing, hopeless world around me...the one that Jesus came to and healed sick people, and helped them walk, and brought them back...to...life. I mean to say that this is our essence, it is who we are, it is our destiny? I'm stepping out of today's nominal thinking and daring to explore that maybe heaven isn't so much a place in the sky that our spirits all end up, but something we become as a person...a people...but more importantly a kingdom. Jesus says in John 17 that this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. What is it that is passing you by in the passenger seat of a small SUV somewhere between Earth and Heaven?