These things always happen when you least expect them.
Archie and I were out for an evening constitutional. Archie is our two-year-old miniature Schnauzer, and he’d been house-bound for the better part of a week by his owners’ bout with a stomach bug. He was more than ready for a good stretch-of-the-legs, and was expressing his appreciation for the outing by displaying better-than-usual manners, strolling through the neighborhood twilight.
No barking to speak of. No hysterics at the teens across the street, shooting baskets. No rumbling growls at the little children playing in the distance. Oh, we had the usual exorbitant sniffing, and a few stubborn stops at the obligatory bushes and light poles for his yoga exercises and an especially thorough intake of the lingering aromas, but we were making jig time.
We had just rounded the last corner of the block, trotting along six or seven houses from home, when the black blur shot into my peripheral vision. A mastiff, coming on like a U-boat torpedo, straight for Archie.
He came hurtling out of an open garage to my left and made no sound but the scratch of his paws on the pavement. But he was two or three times the size of his prey, and Archie greeted his sudden, swift, and ominous appearance with a kind of growling half-bark that could have been anything from “Hey!” to a yelp for “Help!” or a defiant “You wanna piece-a me?”
Instinctively, I tugged Archie back and tried to step between the big dog and my own. No good – the big dog was too nimble. He slipped around me and snapped way too close to Archie’s jugular. Archie was trying to hold his ground and now barking his head off, but his screeching insults just bounced off the big dog coming at him. The two of them ducked and dodged and nipped at each other, then the big one made a savage lunge in close.
Which was when, without really thinking what I was doing, I yanked Archie clean off the ground and up into the air. Happily, he was wearing his harness (if he’d just had the leash on, I’d have strangled him, poor fellow, in my zeal to save his neck), and for a moment, he was just dangling there, five feet off the ground, robbed of all dignity but too startled to notice.
The big dog was startled, too, and I seized the moment to kick at him, trying to keep him at leg’s length as I clutched Archie to my chest, from whence he began scrambling and clawing up my shoulder toward higher ground at the back of my neck.
Suddenly, the big dog bolted, as his master came hurrying out of the garage – a young father with a two-year-old girl bawling louder than Archie and clinging to her dad’s neck for all she was worth. Their mastiff vanished around the corner of the house. The dad turned his attention to his shrieking little girl. I apologized for kicking his dog and hurried with my squirming one toward our own driveway, where I could see my wife running to meet us. (She’d heard the roar and commotion from inside the house, 100 yards away.)
A moment later, Archie landed on his feet in the living room, seemingly no worse for the wear. If I expected fervent gratitude for my efforts, I was somewhat disappointed. While my heart raced on for a while, he strolled over and began mildly eating dinner as if nothing had happened.
A Bible verse nagged at the back of my mind, in the days following our adventure. That may seem a little odd – what verses, biblical or otherwise, do you associate with dog fighting? But after a while, the words of Psalm 27 finally made their way out of the mental fog:
“And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me;
Therefore I will offer sacrifices of joy in His tabernacle;
I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord.”
I have been thinking of times, through the years, when my Father in heaven was good enough to yank me out of a fray or two. Some of them, literal: a showdown on a playground, a group of shady Brazilians wielding guns, two men with knives poised, on an island in the Caribbean. Even a snarling dog or two.
Some of the frays were more metaphorical: heartaches … surgeries … financial crises … office politics … spiritual freefalls.
All of the situations seemed desperate and hopeless in the moment; most of them faded as fast, post-crisis, as the big black dog from Archie’s canine mind, a few minutes after the fracas.
But there are moments, unexpected as a charging bulldog, when the terror of those crowded moments-gone-by flashes across my fickle memory. Hoisting Archie, and catching that fleeting glimpse of him dangling in mid-air, reminds me of moments when I felt just as disoriented and helpless – and as utterly dependent on the intercession of Someone bigger than myself.
It’s the time of year when family members call to ask what I want for Christmas. Their intentions are loving and gracious, but what they have in mind will mostly crowd the already-packed closets and dressers and bookshelves of my little home.
What I really want for Christmas, I realize, as I remember Archie dangling in the twilight, is to be mercifully lifted out of the so many things I don’t see coming, in the days and years ahead.
And for grace to remember those rescues, after the fact … singing praises to the One whose love – again and again and again – has lifted me.
“Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord,” James writes, “and He will lift you up.” This Christmas, may God bless us, every one, with that humility that alone can lift our spirits, clear our heads, and save our troubled souls.
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