Dear North Church,

From time to time, maybe once a week if I can manage it, I’ll send you one of these iterations of a reflection on things Godly and human that won’t take any time at all to read. I call these God Briefly. I hope you’ll find them helpful.
The Lesson of the Three-legged Dog (God Briefly #1)
Emotion and its hyper cousin, passion, can help humans scale to great heights and explore tremendous depths. It is impossible to think of a great performance (an aria, a piano or violin concerto, a poignant moment of acting or teaching) that does not have the force of emotion, even passion behind it. Has any would-be lover ever been believed with an “I love you” delivered in a monotone? 

But there is a dark side to emotion too. Rage is frequently passionate, but it is often destructive too. (Righteous anger, though, such as Jesus demonstrated in the court of the Gentiles when he drove out the money-changers has a purity to it, a white heat, unalloyed with self-interest). Sometimes emotion is involuntary and overtakes us. But there are times when we choose to attach emotion to an event or circumstance, such as pain or an insult or bad luck. You can almost feel and visualize emotion wrapping itself around our reaction to a person who has hurt us or a particularly galling bad break or a straw that seems one too many for this camel’s back. What’s to be done? Self-control is listed as a fruit of the Holy Spirit but how difficult it can seem under what seems in the moment as extreme provocation. Consider the three-legged dog.

A vet once told me that dogs are actually three-legged creatures who happen, most of the time, to have four legs. So too the deer I’ve seen a couple of times in our back yard who maneuvers on three legs, the fourth clearly having been broken at some point. They seem to deal with such circumstance with more equanimity than many humans. For some of God’s creatures, whatever has happened is a fact, not a tragedy. Is anything improved by getting angry or riled or worse still, depressed, by a pain or a stupid driver or a slight from a careless person? 

Save emotion for matters that matter and then give them your all. The rest? Just a three-legged dog story.


-Pastor Daniel England