Pandemic Ponderings -- Foreigner

 I haven't been writing. I haven't wanted to. There's been far too much going on in the world around me and I have been far too busy merely surviving to have the bandwidth to actually write. But someone asked me the other day, "What has God been teaching you recently?" As I thought about that answer, and as I look at the world around me, and as I think about all that I have been reading and learning over the past two years, my answer is threefold and will form a three-fold blog mini-series.

First,  I am a foreigner on this earth.

Second, I serve a lot of idols.

Third, I am learning to lament.

So, first, I am a foreigner on this earth. The last two years have made me intensely uncomfortable as a Canadian. Oh, not just in the typical pandemic-living-is-awkward-and-unpleasant way, but more in a I'm-wearing-shoes-that-don't-fit way. It all just feels so wrong, and it's not just about the pandemic restrictions. It's about the attitudes, the rage, the fear, the disrespect and disdain, the deep hostility people are holding toward each other. I've spent the last two years trying to figure out what my response ought to be to all of it. I can't move about as easily as I could before. I can't meet with friends and family as freely as I could before. Costs are rising. Violence is rising. I've had to teach online -- ok at best, but certainly not ideal. Who do I listen to? What news channel do I follow? Is all of this really a deep global conspiracy to overthrow all that is good and light and right? Should I be taking up arms (literally or figuratively) and fighting for rights that have been stripped away? If I do choose to follow the injunctions, am I giving in to a great evil that will soon see me receiving the mark of the beast? Or am I doing the right thing as a follower of Jesus by submitting to the authorities? Are people who throw anti-lockdown protests the heroes because they are fighting for our rights? Are people who quietly roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated the heroes because they are fighting for the common good? Who do I listen to? Who do I follow?

As the last two years have crept by (and they have felt longer than all the other years of my life) I have become more and more convicted of one thing: the reason living in this country feels like wearing a shoe that doesn't fit is because my citizenship is not of this country. My citizenship is of the kingdom of heaven. I am a Christ-follower, not a Canadian. Oh, sure, I live in this country, and I carry a passport for this country, and I pay taxes in this country, and, to this point, I have been afforded certain rights because I happen to live in the borders of this country. But my allegiance is not to this country. It is to Christ. My citizenship is of the kingdom of heaven.

Yeah, yeah, sure, you might say, but what's your point?

Just this: I had fallen into the trap of believing that somehow the rights I have as a Canadian equal my rights as a citizen of Christ.

Let's face it -- it's been pretty comfortable in this country. I have never been persecuted (unless you want to call someone making some fun of you being persecuted, but go tell that to the Christians in Iran or Afghanistan). I've never gone hungry, at least not in the way that people go hungry who are trying to survive on two spoons of maize a day. I've never been prevented from gathering with other Christians (or with other people period, Christians or not).  When I got sick, there was always medical help. I've been allowed to go wherever I want whenever I want and no one has ever stopped me. And I have believed that these rights are not just earthly rights of an earthly kingdom, but divine rights. That is, they are rights that belong to me as a citizen of Christ.

But that's a lie.

They are not heavenly rights. They are earthly rights of an earthly kingdom of which I am not a citizen, and as earthly rights of an earthly kingdom, they could be here today and gone tomorrow. And the rights that I have as a citizen of Christ are very, very different.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Blessed are the merciful.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Take up your cross and follow me.

When I examine my own heart, I don't see a whole lot of poor in spirit, mourning, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, mercy, pureness of heart, peacemaking, or rejoicing in persecution. I see instead pride, complaining, hungering and thirsting for the items missing off the grocery store shelves, hostility and rage, throwing of insults, bristling against restrictions and calling it persecution, self-satisfied smugness and superiority, and on and on. My heart is an ugly, ugly place, bristling against the removal of earthly rights I think I am owed because I happen to live in this country.

God has convicted me. My attitude is not right. My eyes have been on my earthly citizenship, and not on my heavenly citizenship. I have been chafing against shoes that don't fit right anymore when they should never have fit in the first place. It is very easy to think I am poor in spirit when no one pushes on my pride. It is easy to talk about mourning when I am not actually mourning. It is easy to act meek when everyone is polite. It is easy to be a peacemaker when everyone agrees with me. It is easy to talk about persecution when I'm not actually suffering at all in any way. I should always have recognised the upside-down nature of my citizenship. But it is only in the last two years that I've really begun to feel it.

I am not a citizen of Canada. The rights that I have heretofore enjoyed have changed. Maybe they have changed forever, I don't know. But when I am brutally honest with myself, none of that has affected my citizenship in Christ. Nor does it affect the rights and responsibilities I have toward my King. I am still fully free to follow him.

Do the pandemic restrictions make me uncomfortable? Do I wish they weren't so? Do they sadden me, stress me, and make me feel miserable and anxious at times? Do I hate them? Unequivocably yes. But do any of them prevent me from living as a citizen of Christ? Before God, no. In fact, in these days of rage and hostility, my living as a citizen of Christ, should I manage to do it to any degree, could even be a light in the darkness of anger and fear that I see around me. But oh, how it chafes. How the shoes rub with every step I take.

"They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country -- a heavenly one" (Hebrews 11:13-15).

May that heavenly country come with haste.

Miss You Most

I miss you most in the evening. I miss the routine of taking you out at night for one last pee, shivering in the cold, peering through the dark, watching for skunks as you take your sweet time finding the right spot. I miss having to put up the baby gates to keep you out of the living room. I miss getting your Kong and filling it, and watching you dash to your bed, eager, anticipating. One last pat as you took your Kong, and and then I headed upstairs to the contented sounds of you working out the contents of the Kong. I miss you most in the evening.

I miss you most as I am falling asleep, as my mind, in an unguarded moment, slams against the reality that you are no longer here, as I see your head drooping over the vet's arm as she helped to lift you out of the car, hanging in death in a way it never ever hung in life. I miss you most as I am falling asleep.

I miss you most in the morning when I come downstairs, and you are not there at the bottom of the stairs to greet me. There is no joyful reunion, no happy dance, no leaning up against me for your morning pet, just a breakfast I am not particularly hungry to eat, a breakfast I force myself to eat because breakfast had rituals that involved you. My kefir lasts longer because you are not there to share it. When I take out the blueberries, you're not there to ask for one. You don't come running when my spoon scrapes on the bottom of the yogurt container. It makes me not want to eat blueberries and yogurt. I miss you most in the morning.

I miss you most when I sit down on the couch to put on my boots, and you don't come running to bury your head in my lap so I can scratch your ears. I miss the feel of the soft, soft fur on your ears and the top of your head, and the way you burrowed your head in my lap and groaned in pleasure as I rubbed your ears. There are no twirls of anticipation as you pretend to try to catch your tail but are really just so excited at the thought of walks or road trips or barn adventures. Somehow you knew exactly what was coming by the footwear I put on. I miss you most when I am putting on my boots.

I miss you most in the car and I look into the rear view mirror and do not see your ears sticking up above the seat. I drive past the Starbucks and there is no drama. You aren't there to ask for your own puppachino or to flirt with the people working drive-thru. There is no new nose art, and I cannot bear to wash the old art away. I miss you most when I am driving in the car.

I miss you most when I open the cupboard to get a bandaid and see all of your grooming stuff there and realise I will never again have to clip your nails or brush you or clean out your ears or check you for ticks. I will never again have to doctor a hotspot or give you a pill or an allergy shot. I never did get the spot under your ear healed -- there was still a scab on the day we said goodbye. I had wanted it to be healed. Why did I want that spot to be healed? What difference did it make? But I did, and I miss you when I think about never having to care for you again.

I miss you most when I am working or watching tv or reading a book. You aren't there to shove stinky toys in my lap, or to lay your head in my lap and just look up at me. No more stinky toys shoved alluringly at my hands, no more heavy head in my lap, no more long looks of love, no more pats and hugs and nuzzles and leans and licks and the thousand little ways I had daily physical contact with another living being who loved me freely and was loved in return. I miss you most in those quiet in-between moments.

I don't believe you're "in heaven". I don't believe in rainbow bridges. You are not possessor of a soul created in the image of God, and while I believe there will be dogs on the new earth, I don't believe we will have a reunion. It is goodbye, girl. Not just see you later, not until we meet again, but goodbye. The greatest comfort that I can conjure is that your body will break down and nurture the ground of a place you loved. But believing all that doesn't change my grief. It does not negate the tears I shed. I do not love you less or miss you less because I believe you are just dead and not "in a better place". My life is emptier with you not in it. My heart aches so much sometimes I can hardly catch my breath to breathe. No, believing you are just dead does not make my grief less sharp. I am grieving differently because you were a dog and not a human, but it is legitimate and genuine and right and appropriate that I grieve, and it is real grief. You were a constant presence and a companion. You knew my routines and my moods. You watched me always. You brought joy and love and physical contact into my life. You were my dog, and I loved you dearly.

Oh, my little girl, my good girl, I miss you most.

Just a Dog

 Today I said goodbye to my dog. I took her to the farm – a place she loves -- and I had the farm vet euthanise her in the back of my car while I held her in my arms, and then we buried her in a grave I had dug earlier. I did my best to ensure it was the most peaceful and stressless way I could let her go. She was frail. She was losing feeling in her back legs, and she didn’t know where she was putting her feet anymore. She fell a lot, wobbled, couldn’t run, dragged her feet, couldn’t squat properly to go to the bathroom, was becoming incontinent. But her mind was still sharp. She didn’t think anything was wrong with her. She still wanted to play, still wanted to chase the squirrels and bark at the dog next door. She even roused herself from sedation to have one last bark at the farm cats.

 

Euthanasia – good death. It’s a lie, you know. There is no such thing as a good death. Death is horrible, even when it is “just a dog”. She went from a vibrant, muscled, alert creature to a slack and sagging mound of flesh in a matter of moments. Her eyes went from bright golden shoe buttons to clouded opacity in the time it took me to draw a breath. Her great and loving heart stilled under the assault of the drugs in her veins. Death is not good. It is heavy and hideous. Her fur is still soft and her body is still warm but it is so horribly loose. I can hardly lift her, and she flops and slithers where before, even in her weakness, she leaned and loved and held her own weight.

 

Good death. It’s not a good death. It’s just death and I miss her so much I am startled by the hugeness of the hollow in my heart. She’s “supposed” to be just a dog. It isn’t “supposed” to hurt this much. But it does. So much of my daily routine is wound up in caring for her. I don’t even know how to go to bed without the routine of taking her out for one last potty break, making sure the gates are up so she doesn’t sneak into the front rooms at night, getting her Kong and a handful of kibble and the can of dog food from the fridge and preparing her nightly treat. She sits and waits until I give her the spoon to lick off (two pills tucked inside the pasty canned meat she loves), and then runs to her bed and jumps on it, waiting, eager. And now I am to just get up and go to bed? How? And how do I face tomorrow, coming down the stairs, with no dog to greet me at the bottom and lean against me for pats and scratches? I am dreading almost to despair the long months of a lockdown winter without my dog lying on the rug beside me as I work alone from home and getting up every so often to put her great head in my lap and look up at me just because I am there, and she can.

 

Good death? Damn death. Damn this whole horrible, broken, miserable, pandemic-blighted year. Damn the devil who laughs at disease and death, even if it is just the death of a dog.

 

Aye, but isn’t that the crux of it? Because it is all damned, groaning under the agony of the curse, the curse of my sin, our sin, the sin of this broken world. But, for the grace of God, it is all damned, and I am damned with it, and the curse crushes, and when I think about it, it is not anger I feel but deep, deep sorrow, not just for a dog but for the whole of this world crying out for redemption. It is not damnation I desire but redemption, a longing for the curse to be finally broken, for death to be done, for my faith to be made sight. Oh, God, when? How long, O Lord? “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here. O come, thou Rod of Jesse, free thine own from Satan’s tyranny; From depths of hell thy people save, and give them victory over the grave. O come, thou Key of David, come and open wide our heavenly home; Make safe the way that leads on high, and close the path to misery.” O come, Emmanuel. Emmanuel, come back!

 

But there is more than brokenness in this world. There is joy and laughter and love. Every good gift is a foretaste of the new heavens and new earth. My dog was a gift. She had a good life. She was larger than life, living with an intensity that sometimes drove me mad but mostly brought me joy because in so many ways, it mirrored my own. She was smart, eager, always ready to play. I could never train her not to eat the toilet paper or to sneak into the rooms she wasn’t allowed to be in or to bark at the dog next door, but she learned to spell r-a-b-b-i-t and to recognise the Starbucks logo without our even trying to teach her. She came with me to the barn every time I went, for years, waiting patiently in the car until it was her turn, then running with abandon through the woods, playing in the puddles, finding the biggest sticks she could carry to take me out at the knees when she ran by at full speed. She went on many, many road trips with my housemate and me, travelling on motorboats, pontoon boats, ferries, busses, and tractor-drawn wagons. She’s been all over southwestern Ontario with us, has been camping and cottaging and hiking. She lived life to the full – no, more than to the full, and when she wasn’t frustrating us, she was making us roar with laughter. If she could leap, she leapt. If she could run, she galloped. If she could dig, she’d dig trenches like the Grand Canyon. If one ball was good, three were better. Everything was over the top. She wrested every drop of joy and love and life out of every day she had, right up to the end. 

 

Good death? Never. Good life? For sure.

 

Maybe she was just a dog, but I miss her.