Let go and let dog

A blind man is standing on the corner with his dog. The dog hikes his leg and pees on the blind man’s leg. The blind man reaches into his pocket, pulls out a dog treat, and holds it out for the dog.

Another man, watching all this, says, “Wow. That dog just peed on your leg, and you’re petting him and giving him a treat. You must really love that dog!”

To which the blind man replied, “Actually, I’m just making sure which end is his head so I can kick him in the butt!’’

There’s another story of the blind man who walks into the department store with his seeing eye dog. He pulls the lease tight, then starts spinning the dog around and around in circles. A clerk in the store sees this and runs over to the blind man and says, “Can I help you with something?”

“No,’’ says the blind man. “I’m just looking around.”

An Irishman is out walking his wife’s poodle. He buddy comes up and says, “You need to get down to the pub, they’re giving away free pints of Guinness!” The man hurries down to the pub with the poodle, but the doorman says, “We don’t allow dogs in here.”

The man, thinking quickly, says, “I’m blind, and this is my seeing eye dog.”

The doorman says, “No. Seeing eye dogs are German Shepards or Golden Retrievers, big dogs.”

The man says, “Oh! What did they give me?”

***

You’ve heard the old joke about the dyslexic atheist who didn’t believe in dog?

I saw a bumper sticker on a car that said, “Let go and let God.” It occurred to me that, like a lot of similar bumper stickers, that sounds nice. I get what they’re saying. But “letting God” can be really difficult, particularly for people who have been raised to be self-sufficient and that we should never have to depend on anybody for anything.

And that brought me to a blind man with a seeing eye dog. I apologize for the jokes, but here is where I wanted to go:

What the blind man with a seeing eye dog is really doing is “letting go and letting dog.”

(See what I did there?)

I have no idea how hard it must be for a blind person to get a dog and learn to absolutely put their trust in an animal. I have watched folks working with blind people, training them on how to handle and trust their seeing eye dog, walking around downtown, across busy intersections and into restaurants and stores. I am amazed at how smart these dogs are. And I’m sure blind people who are getting seeing eye dogs are amazed as well.

But knowing how smart and well-trained these dogs are and actually putting your complete trust – your very life – in one of them takes a level of trust that is hard for me to imagine.

I have read that the hardest part of learning to trust a seeing eye dog is letting go of control and trusting the dog’s instincts. Seeing eye dogs are highly trained to work as a team, but they are also independent animals with their own sense of safety. Still, you have to be willing to follow the dog’s lead, no matter what you may hear or feel.

This means that even when you’ve learned the rules and commands, you must still be willing to let the dog take over. You can’t take away or second-guess the dog’s initiative. If the dog decides to stop or suddenly change direction, you have to trust that the dog knows what is best, that it’s protecting you. In particular, in a strange environment, the dog’s gut feeling about where to go and how to get there should certainly be more reliable than that of a blind person.

It occurs to me that learning to trust that seeing eye dog is, in some ways, like learning to “let go and let God.”

James 2:19 says, “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.” That verse has always given me pause. The suggestion is that believing there is a God is not enough. Satan himself knows there is a God.

The trick is to believe and then put your faith – trust your very life – in God. James also says, “Faith without works is dead.” I believe what James is saying is that it’s not enough just to believe there is a God; you have to put that belief into action in the real world, in the way you live your everyday life.

Sometimes we Christians can feel really pleased with ourselves because we believe in God. But do we believe enough to step out there – to go back to my blind man/seeing eye dog idea – when it sounds like we might be stepping in front of a bus? When you don’t know if that step is a four-inch curb or a 10-foot cliff? When you can feel the crowd of people around you going in one direction and your dog is taking you in another?

Faith tells us who we really are. Not just who we have faith in, but how we live out that faith. Sometimes our “rational” mind will tell us one thing, sorting through all the “facts,” the good and bad and possible outcomes of a given action, weighing this decision against that one, trying to figure out the right thing to do by deductive reasoning.

To use another “seeing” analogy, when I drive my car at night, I use my headlights. It’s still dark all around me. I can’t always see what’s on either side of the car or what might be behind me. Usually, I can’t really even see any further ahead than what my headlights expose. But there is enough illumination ahead for me to confidently go down the road I’m on – and usually at a high rate of speed.

The Apostle Paul says in his second letter to Timothy (2 Timothy 1:12), “I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until that day.”

Sometimes I think faith can only happen in complete humility. Sometimes if feels like I have to be willing to not ask questions and not expect answers, only have a willingness to go forward.

Jesus said, quoted in John 14:1, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me.”

Honestly, it takes time. At least for me it does. It has taken probably more time than it should have, more time than God would have liked, to get to the point where I can really “let go and let God.”

It feels like I have to make the decision almost daily to believe and not expect some big experience that justifies such faith, but to take the small daily steps of faith, the routine of everyday life, that lead to really “letting go and letting God.”

There is an old hymn we used to sing in the church I grew up in, “Tis So Sweet To Trust in Jesus.” The chorus goes:

Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him,

How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er,

Jesus, Jesus, Precious Jesus!

O for grace to trust Him more.

Oh, for grace to trust Him more. Oh, to be able to fully and completely “let go and let God.”

When the blind man learns to trust his dog completely, how freeing that must be.