We all loved Briggs. Briggs was a Golden Retriever, pet dog of one of my sons. He was big, docile, obedient, lovable but overweight and useless. He could not hunt. He wasn’t a watch dog. He cowered away from the sound of engines, such as lawn mowers or vacuums. He would wait for his master inside the truck until he died if the truck were abandoned with windows open. Having been neutered he could not breed. Nevertheless, Briggs had large value. We loved him. His value in the world was related to the family members and neighbors who cared about him. That was enough. (This Page was first written when he was alive. Old age did him in.)
If I were to try to instruct Briggs on calculus, or Plato’s philosophy, or even the concerns of the Peanuts comic panel in the newspaper, he would look at me in that same soulful expression that greeted everything else we said to him. He would understand nothing. My reasoning belonged to another world than his brain. He didn’t understand, but he accepted our love, our petting, and our happy words. He felt safe with us. We could tell by his moving tail (evidence). It’s the feeling of acceptance that counts for the recipient, and that may have taught him something human. His life was limited, but he seemed quite at peace about the whole matter. His gruel and beverage were repetitive. Each day was about the same. He didn’t appear to be bored. He was a burly companion. Again, his tail, to the right and left, gave signal of canine satisfaction.
With all its multiple variances, my life may begin closer to the life of Briggs than it is to the life of God. Despite the variety of factors that form persons and the knowledge that reasoning beings have of their existence and environment, it is likely that the life I live is, to God, no less limited in perceptions than was Briggs to mine. Once I become humble enough to qualify myself in limited mortal terms, I begin to focus on God, and He makes it possible for me to learn something about Him. He makes the faith way. Similar to the Briggs analogy, I find my worth, attractiveness, and immortality, related to love and someone else. God so loved us that He provided life gifts, especially immortality in Christ, and incorporated we really need nothing more in earth’s interim.
Have you ever tried to give a gift to someone who has everything? What can I give to a Creator who is so far above anything that I might do, or be, or conjure? There really is only one thing, and that is me. That doesn’t take a great deal of thought or sacrifice. He is no fool who gives what he can’t keep so that he may gain what he can’t lose, said Jim Elliott, my college class-mate and a missionary martyr. Science seeks answers to nature’s meaning, and science should. But, answers will never be found to satisfaction without God. Human thought and arts can be developed to high sublimity, but they will lack something without God. God reveals just so much, because, like Briggs, we can absorb only so much. But we can, by faith and practice, enter into some part of what it is that God has revealed, and so be convinced that this is not just a charade we are playing out on the stage of our earth beginning (birth) to our earth end (death). As animals were offered to us on our terms, and visited upon the animals, so we must be offered to God on God’s terms visited on persons. That is supreme for me, and is exactly what I would have chosen as a reasonable analogy for God and people. It may be that the relationship that we have with the animals, principally vertebrates, is living analogy of our nature experience with God. In the end the lesser yields to the greater. The greater knows more, has more resources and larger objectives than the lesser. Gaining participation the lesser is lifted and valued. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020