In my last post, I told you about my best buddy, my sweet little Maltipoo named Todd.
I ended by telling you about his tendency to be persistent and showing his persistence by ringing his bell when he needs something.
When Todd was just a puppy, we used the bell system to teach him to let us know when he needed to go outside. These bells resembled Christmas Jingle Bells. We just hung the leather strap over the handle of the sliding door. Even as a tiny puppy, Todd would reach up to ring his bells and let us know he needed to go outside. He learned very quickly that the bells got our attention. And so that became the routine at our house, ring the bells… go potty.
However, when we moved to our new house, those same bells wouldn’t hang on the new lever-style door knobs. Instead, they would fall off every time someone opened the door. So, we abandoned the bell-ringing idea.
For a few years, Todd would scratch on the door when he needed to go out, but his continuous scratching began to knock the paint off my doors. I didn’t love this, but I didn’t know what to do.
One day our neighbor posted a picture of a bell she was using to train her new puppy. This bell sat on the floor and resembled a bell you might see at the front desk of a hotel.
This could be our answer!
My family quickly assured me that Todd was too old to learn how to ring a new bell, especially one that was harder to use.
But I ordered one anyway… well, because I’m just stubborn.
I’m unsure if I wanted to teach Todd a new trick or prove my family wrong, but whatever it was, the motivation was there.
So, for one entire day, I would take his little white paw and push the new bell every time Todd scratched the door to go potty. When I would do that, I would say, “go potty, Todd, go potty.”
My family had a wonderful time laughing at me.
Much to my delight, that same night, as we were all sitting around the living room, we heard a small “ding.” We all looked over, and there Todd sat, just as proud as he could be ringing his new bell.
I was so proud of him, and frankly, I was pretty proud of myself for teaching him.
Now that he has mastered ringing this bell to go potty and has also become exceptionally talented in using it when he also wants food or water, I decided to purchase an upgraded system. These are little colored buttons where you can record words like potty, treat, food, water, etc., and then train the dog to push whatever button suits his needs.
That will be my next training project with Todd; I feel he will be very successful.
I mentioned last time that the dogs go out in the open yard to potty. Todd rings the bell for all three of our dogs. He’s the “designated bell ringer.” Our Yorkie does a downward dog pose when she needs to potty, and our Springer Spaniel sits by the door. But usually, it is Todd who rings his bell and lets us know for all of them.
We have a small lake behind our house. There are trees all around it, and in those trees, there are squirrels. And my dogs love a good squirrel chase.
Every morning the dogs fly out the door with unbridled joy.
Every. Single. Morning.
We laugh at them because they head out the door, running like it’s the first time they’ve ever been outside.
They bark excitedly and go racing through the yard as fast as they can, hoping to eventually catch that evasive squirrel.
And this is the scene every day. In fact, they often do it several times a day.
When this happens, this verse comes to my mind.
Lamentations 3:22-23
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.
Mercy- compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.
It might sound strange that dogs going outside to potty makes me think of this Bible verse. But their reaction to doing the same thing over and over and experiencing it like something new always brings that scripture to my mind.
I don’t know about you, but I am a repeat offender.
I have a temper.
I sometimes say things before they go through my brain filter.
I snap at my kids or my husband and immediately feel bad.
I have been known to cuss a little… maybe more than a little…
I don’t read my Bible daily or have the perfect prayer life.
The list goes on…
I am a fallen, sinful person…
I find myself making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. Then I go to God asking for help and forgiveness, and I feel ashamed. How many times can one person struggle with the same things? Surely God is tired of me by now… But HIS mercies are new every morning.
When I feel lonely…
When I feel tired…
When I feel depressed…
When I feel stuck…
When I feel like I’m just not good enough…
When I feel ugly…
When I feel unworthy…
When I worry…
When I feel like a terrible friend…
When I feel like a lousy mom…
When I feel like a lousy wife…
When my anxiety is high…
When I just want to run out of the room…
HIS Mercies are new every morning.
I’ve heard a lot of preachers preach sermons about holiness. They are almost always about how Christians should strive to be holy. We should better ourselves, work on things, and make ourselves look prettier to God and the world.
My kids told me several times about sitting through sermons where the youth pastor taught about holiness. To hear them tell it, almost every Wednesday night, holiness was the topic. And they would come home feeling defeated and confused. Why was so much emphasis being put on making oneself holy?
They would tell me that it felt like the youth pastor wanted them to work for their salvation. They would even say that the youth pastor would tell them they should strive to be holy but would only talk about church attendance, morning Bible study attendance, bringing friends to youth with them on Wednesdays… but there was never anything about relying on Jesus.
It was all about making themselves better to get closer to God instead of getting closer to God to make themselves better.
It always seemed like a waste of time to take those precious moments with teenagers and spend that time telling them what they could do better and how to be better on their own.
What they needed to hear, and what we all need to hear, is that we need more of Jesus… walking with Him, talking to Him, trusting Him… letting Him clean up the inside first.
Something about those sermons never sat right with me. And they caused us as a family to have many at-home discussions about what God expected from us as His children.
While writing this section, my editing software relentlessly wanted me to change the word holy to religious. That could have been to keep me from using the same word repeatedly, but even that made me stop and think… have we made the word holy and religious the same thing?
I’m pretty sure that Jesus came to destroy “religion.” The Pharisees were extremely religious, and Jesus wasn’t a big fan of them…
Matthew 23:4
They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger.
Matthew 23:15
What sorrow awaits you, teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are!
Matthew 23:25
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside, they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First, clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
Religion and Christianity are not the same.
And maybe that’s what we’ve done. Perhaps we have made holiness a religion. We have definitely made it into something it is not. We tend to do that with a lot of things.
I always knew that the Bible taught about holiness and that it was good, but I never completely understood how that was done. Was it a self-help thing? Was there a prescribed checklist I was supposed to work through to reach a holier status?
How many times do holy people attend church each week? Do holy people cuss? Can holy people be depressed or struggle with anxiety? Do holy people drink alcohol? Do holy people only say kind things about the church and never call out the wrongs? Do holy people respect the pastor and his position and never question it?
What are the levels of holiness, and who decides what those are? I’ve known a lot of people who thought their level of holiness was quite high. They had checked all the religious holy boxes.
I came across this quote by Tim Keller: “Helplessness, not holiness, is the first step to accessing the presence of God.”
Lisa Harper worded it differently by saying, “The first step to intimacy with Jesus is not holiness, but helplessness.”
Those words really hit me hard when I read them. So much so that I wrote them down and have kept them in my notes.
Jesus isn’t asking me to help myself become better to draw close to Him. Instead, He wants me to realize that I am helpless, and that helplessness draws me closer to Him.
To be holy means to be different and set apart.
It’s not so much about behavior. And I’m not saying there aren’t behaviors we can work on, there certainly are, but that’s not the point of holiness.
It’s about who you are, not what you are.
Or maybe it would be better said that it’s not about who you are but instead whose you are.
It’s God that purifies and sets us apart. It’s not something that we do through our own power.
God says draw close to me, and I will draw close to you… Not clean yourself up first, and then I will draw close to you.
I can’t give myself a fresh, blank slate every morning… Nope, I’m still beating myself up over something I’ve said or done. Maybe something I forgot or didn’t get done that day. I am hard on myself.
I beat myself up more than I care to admit.
If how I thought of myself was the standard, I would’ve given up on Christianity a long time ago. Because on my own, I can’t make the cut.
But HIS mercies… HIS mercies are new every single morning. He is faithful. I am helpless…
It is not my striving to do better and be better that draws me close to Jesus; it’s me realizing that I can’t do it on my own.
To be more like Him, I need more of Him…
I have to realize my helplessness…
I have to trust Him, not myself.
My Mamaw used to say that every night before going to bed, she would lay all of her burdens and worries at the feet of Jesus. And then she laughed and told me that as hard as she tried not to, she always found that she picked it all back up the next morning and tried to carry it again on her own.
As good of a Christian woman as my sweet Mamaw was and as humble and kind as I always knew her to be… she was helpless in her human state. Jesus knew she couldn’t carry it alone. He knew when she gave all her burdens to Him the night before, her human tendency would be to worry about it again the next day. Then she would come to Him again the next night and the next night… and that’s ok because she knew who could help her carry those burdens, and HIS mercies were new…
My little pups will run out the door again in the morning. They will get excited, bark and run, and chase their squirrel… they will forget that they just did the same thing the day before and the day before…
They teach me a lesson every day. Each day is new. Each day is a gift, and it’s all because of His mercy.
Jesus knows I’m going to mess up, and when I do, He is waiting with open arms to show me the mercy I don’t deserve.
That, my friends, is the essence of the Gospel message.
Until Next time,
Whitney