I love my dog Lucky. Well, he’s mine for now, since I moved in with my sister Rose. He’s the best pal, and most loyal. At 94 dog-years he is mostly blind and deaf. Walks and bones are the joy of his life, besides us of course. We are Nigerians and we cook a great spinach & melon soup called ‘egusi soup’. I cooked one the other day, with chicken. You know the fresh, tough ones that you have to boil for awhile before anyone can chew it.
The soup now, two days old, it’s even more delicious. I warmed up some and paired it with pounded yam (that’s another recipe story), sat on the couch and ate. Lucky was sleeping somewhere in the house and I don’t know if it was just naptime-over or he smelled that soup, but after I had finished eating he arrived. Now I was kinda lazy, so I perched the empty plate of chicken bones, on the back of the couch. Lucky came sniffing around. I knew he was allowed to have bones, but I texted my sister to ask her if he could have any bones:
“Can Lucky have any kind of bones’ ‘Cos he’s smellin’ my egusiJ”
She answered: “Ha ha ha. Yes he can. I usually rinse it off, and Manny always gave him bones from his soup. He is a greedy dog!” Manny was her late husband and he cooked a mean egusi soup too.
Well, Lucky may be greedy, but he’s smart. I didn’t rinse it off just picked up a nice clean bone from my plate and put it in front of the dog’s nose. He can hardly see and he can’t hear “over here Lucky”, so you have to help him get to the bone without losing a finger. Finally he go
t it and chopped down, mumbling to himself as he enjoyed the bone.
Suddenly, he was frantic and I realized he had dropped it and couldn’t see where it was, but I could hear it being shoved up under the couch. As you can see Lucky is a pug/corgi mix and has no snout to fish out a little arrant bone. But, somehow, miraculously, he got the bone back from the brink of no return, without my help. He grabbed that bone and escaped to the dining room where he had plenty of room and no low furniture to contend with.
It was as if he said “Let me get me some room. There is too much going over there by the couch – her shoes, the rug, the couch. I need some room, so I can really enjoy this bone and not lose it.”
As my family would say, “There’s a sermon in there somewhere”, but immediately I thought of the verse that says something to the effect, He is bringing us out into a wide open space. That’s how I feel right about now – “I need some space, Lord! I’m ready for You to bring me out to a clear open space, so I can get the work done that You have commissioned me to do.”
The waiting continues.
Dahntay my six year old grandson asked me the other day, “Grandmother, what does God eat?” Well of course I said God doesn’t need to eat, but just as I said that the Holy Spirit said, “Tell the boy I eat his praises”. And so I complied. As any six year old he drank it in and God caused it to come out of my mouth so smooth and clear that Dahntay didn’t even have a comeback or further questioning. “God eats your praises Dahntay. When you tell Him how great He is and how much you love Him, He eats that.”
