The Loose Stray Experience

Last night, my Mom, my brother, and I went on an adventure. My brother and I were walking our Mom's dog, Kira, when we saw a stray dog running around the parkway ahead. Kira loves to meet other dogs, so she ran toward the stray and broke the leash. The two dogs chased each other, ultimately ending up in the cemetery. That's when my brother and I called Mom for backup. My brother and I managed to secure Kira by the time Mom arrived, and we tried to catch the stray dog as well, but we failed, the cemetery closed, and we all got locked in. We wandered around the cemetery, looking for an exit, with Kira back on a leash and the stray dog following us. Eventually, we got out and walked home, with the stray following us the whole way. We shut the stray in our yard, got her (or him?) some food, water, and a bed, and planned on putting up Found Dog posters everywhere today. That's mostly why I didn't blog about this experience last night; the story wasn't over yet, or so we thought.

Some time last night or this morning, the stray dog squeezed under our fence and took off for who knows where, making most of our efforts of last night useless. Had we known the stray dog was just going to slip away anyway, we wouldn't have bothered going the extra mile to try to catch it. We might have gotten out of the cemetery in time, and we would have had a much less exciting our difficult experience. Sure, we'd've still had to chase down and recapture Kira, but we could've gone straight home after that, rather than spending so long in that cemetery, chasing the stray and getting locked in. Knowing that ahead of time, we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble and missed out on what might turn out to be a valuable learning experience.

Regardless of how abruptly this experience ended and how pointless much of it ended up being, we still had the experience, and maybe that was the whole point. Maybe we were supposed to get locked in that graveyard, for whatever reason. Maybe we were supposed to learn that some things will follow us, so long as we're not chasing them away in pursuit of them. Maybe it was merely a test of character and endurance. I'll admit, we got a little testy at certain points that evening. Maybe that was all part of the test. And then, when we had experienced everything we needed to experience, God allowed (and perhaps helped) the stray to slip away, sparing us some unnecessary and distracting complications.

I still don't know what all we were supposed to gain from that Loose Stray experience, but I get the feeling that, as short as it was, it's going to become important at some point.