Prayer and Poops

This is a bit complicated but please stay with me--there is a point. It involves dog diarrhea, coyotes, and God.

It’s hunting season in our woods. I hate this week for a couple of reasons. The first is that I’m afraid of someone shooting me! Tasha and I continue to hike, but in our orange outfits with me singing at the top of my lungs. The very terrible thing about hunting is that, when a hunter kills a deer, he or she eviscerates it and leaves the guts in the woods.

Dogs love deer guts.

When Tasha leaves the path—as she did this week—I know she’s found a batch of ‘em. She gulps them down as fast as she can before I find her and drag her away. It is inevitable that she will vomit disgusting stuff and have diarrhea. Sure enough, she did—and being an old dog, we barely got her out of the house in time. She pooped all over our front porch. Given that it was dark and cold, I said I’d clean it up the next day.

Onto the coyotes. They are rampant in our woods and have killed almost every cat in this neighborhood. It’s bad enough when they howl deep in the woods but on the same night Tasha had her diarrhea, they caught something and ripped it apart on our front lawn. Their howling, yipping, and bloody exultation drove me out barefoot to scream at them.

I stepped in Tasha’s diarrhea.

I came back into the house, literally hopping mad. I scrubbed my toes, tried to let the coyote-adrenaline die down, and finally went to bed.

I like to start the day praying at my front door. It’s all glass and looks into the woods. The day after the coyote/diarrhea incidents, I knelt down and bowed my head to praise God.

I saw my footprint in Tasha’s diarrhea.

And I thought—isn’t this God’s mercy? We “step in it” all the time and yet can come to His throne of grace and be scrubbed clean.

NEXT UP: Meet Denise Hildreth and her Sophie.