I Have Said It To A Dog

Her name is Trouble, which was a joke of his late wife's that stopped being a joke about a year after she died and is now simply the dog's name.

She is eleven. She has one ear that goes up and one that does not, and she has a place under the kitchen table where the flagstone is warmest, and she puts her chin on his boot at about half past four in the afternoon every single day, whatever is going on, and has done for six years.

And he talks to her.

Not baby talk. He would be appalled. He talks to that dog the way you talk to somebody who is in the room, and he has done since the first winter on his own, when the house was so quiet he could hear the clock in the hall from the kitchen, which he had never once noticed in thirty-one years of marriage.

And somewhere in the second year, at the stove, he said it out loud.

The whole thing. Not a fragment. The actual sentence, the one about who Jesus is and who he is because of it, said in his own voice at ordinary volume with the extractor off, to a dog with one ear up.

He has said it perhaps a thousand times since. It has become the thing he says while he waits for the kettle.

Trouble, being a dog, does what she has always done, which is thump her tail twice and look at him with total confidence about something entirely unrelated, probably the tin.

He is sixty-eight.

And he has never said it to a human being. Not to his son, who rings on Sundays. Not to the men he sees at the market. Not to the woman who has cut his hair for twenty years and who told him last month that she prays sometimes and does not know why.

The practice was not a substitute

I want to start by defending six years of talking to a dog, because I suspect you have privately filed it as something a bit sad and it is one of the more remarkable things in this whole account.

You said the sentence out loud, in your own voice, at ordinary volume, about a thousand times.

Do you know how rare that is? Most people who have believed for forty years have never once said the actual sentence out loud in an empty room. They have sung around it. They have agreed with it in a group. They have said things adjacent to it at funerals. The specific act of a human being forming those words with their own mouth, alone, unprompted, at ordinary volume, is something a great many lifelong believers have simply never done.

You have done it a thousand times at a stove.

So this page is not going to tell you that it does not count because a dog was the only listener, and if anybody has ever implied that to you they were wrong.

Here is what has actually been happening.

Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy.Psalm 107:2

That is the second verse of that psalm and it is the instruction the whole rest of the psalm illustrates. And the instruction is four words long: let the redeemed say so.

Not testify. Not proclaim. Not stand up in a room. Say so. It is one of the plainest imperatives in Scripture and it names no audience at all.

You have been doing the thing the psalm actually asks for, at a stove, a thousand times, and that is not consolation, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the six years rather than on a verse you have doubtless read.

Now let me say the other half, because there is one and you would not respect a page that only told you the comfortable part.

There is a woman who cuts your hair, who told you last month that she prays sometimes and does not know why.

She said that to you. A woman does not mention that to a man in a chair unless something in her is looking for a place to put it, and she chose you, and you are sixty-eight and you have said the sentence a thousand times and you know exactly how it goes.

I am not going to tell you to go and say it to her. That is not what this page does and it is not what today is for, and there is no version of the next paragraph in which I arrange your Thursday.

But I want you to notice something about your own hands.

You have already got the whole sentence into your mouth, which is the hard part and which took you six years to do, and the remaining distance is not a distance of courage or of words. It is the distance between a kitchen and a barber's chair, and it is much shorter than the one you have already covered.

You are one of the redeemed of the Lord and the instruction to you is four words long. Scripture says say so, and the Spirit of God has been in that kitchen at half past four every afternoon for six years, and He has heard every one of the thousand.

You are one of the redeemed of the Lord, and the instruction to you is four words long. Scripture says let the redeemed say so and names no audience anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit has been in that kitchen at half past four every afternoon for six years.