Another lesson from the dog

I had a silly thought this morning - it involves the honest confession that my dog does in fact shed. I had told my wife that our dog does NOT shed - this was information given to me by two reliable people when we got the animal. It was noted with amazement, "And she just doesn't shed!"

Well, I got her bed out and cleaned it the other day, and there is enough brown hair all around it to make another dog. If I could spin it and weave it, I could have a nice blanket. And it was not just around the bed - as I began to widen my cleaning efforts to the rest of the family room, I found clumps of hair had begun to coalesce in corners, cracks and under furniture all over the room. And later that same day I reached down and grabbed at something that caught my eye on the floor of my truck. You guessed it - another tenth-of-a-dog's-worth of hair. Brown hair. I will need to go buy some back-up bags for the vacuum before I start cleaning out the truck - cleaning the doggy bed and the family room stuffed the last one we had on the shelf.

So - OK - my dog sheds. So what is the silly thought that this brought to my little Chas brain?

I have a desire to leave as much of a mark on my world as my stupid dog leaves. In her case it's just fuzzy wads of hair. But nobody could dig around my world and not know that there had been a brown animal living there. Nobody. So - after I pass from this world, will people look around and have a tough time knowing that I ever lived here? No, I don't want piles of Chas hair, or other cast-offs, to be the thing that reminds them I passed this way. I want something more Godly, more Christ-honoring.

I want to be so full of the goodness of God that I leave a trail of it - at least as much as the trail of brown hair my dog leaves in her wake. Is that asking a lot? We'll see.