Olio: Best Puppy Ever
I pray you all have enjoyed your Christmas festivities! Here in Rockford we had a lovely weekend, including over one hundred in worship on Christmas Day morning. What a pleasure to hear the sanctuary filled to overflowing with the sound of Christian song. What a gift to feast upon the Son of God incarnate in his true, eternal body and blood.
And, what a Christmas blessing my taking ownership of Aurelius has become.
Wasn’t this my dog to begin with? Well, no. He was our dog. As much as I believe in biblical patriarchy (“headship”), I somehow didn’t bother to apply it to my thinking. I assumed that because my wife was training him, and since she (thank God) submits to me, that everything would role right along.
What I didn’t take into account (among other things) was that a dog needs to understand his relationship to the Alpha. That means that the Alpha of the pack (ie the Patriarch) must be the primary imprint, even if the Alpha isn’t the primary “trainer.” The dog must know his place directly, not through an intermediary, even if an intermediary is teaching him to “sit.”
I’m sure this could be done without the Alpha being the “trainer.” But I know from experience that that’s the hard way to do it with a family dog. I can imagine a day where I teach my son to raise his own dog while in my house. But even then I’d be taking ownership of the process in ways that I didn’t do with this, our prior experiment.
There’s many more thoughts and life lessons here already, from “Behavioral learning takes time,” to “A dog knows the way home,” but there will be many days to come for such things. For today, I mainly wanted to say “Hi” to y’all, give you the positive update on the scary puppy situation, and let you know that other writing will return to this substack on as regular a schedule as time permits, including the next chapter of Earth tomorrow.