One of my pet peeves is people who don’t pick up after their dog. It might go back to the time when one of our children was a toddler and we had gone over to the park across the street from our house to run around a bit, and we had run into a neighbor we had just met a little earlier and I started chatting. As we were just getting into our conversation I turned back around to check on our child and was horrified to discover this child eating dog poop. Indeed, we love living across from the park and being able to go over to play whenever we want, but we’ve discovered the hard way it’s always best to scan the ground first before kicking the soccer ball or playing catch. I particularly dislike mowing the lawn in the summertime and discovering that some inconsiderate neighbor has allowed their dog to leave an unwanted gift in our yard and not bothered to pick it up. I admit there are even times when I’m sitting in our living room watching folks walk past our house with their dogs and I’m wondering to myself whether or not they’re the type that doesn’t pick up after their dog. It’s not a side of me I’m particularly proud of…
One of my favorite memories from the church community suppers comes from one of our mid-summer cookouts. A number of us were helping to set up tables in the green space, and there was a rather large, twenty-something young man walking down the sidewalk along Kalamazoo Ave with a small pug trailing twenty feet behind him. He was absorbed in his phone and didn’t notice when his dog saw the stretch of parking lot coming up and decided to take advantage of the church lawn before the asphalt started. My jaw just dropped as I realized the man wasn’t going to turn around and pick up the poop his dog left behind. I was already starting to turn toward the church to go find a bag when I heard Cora Coburn shout out, “Excuse me! Do you need a bag!?” Gracious but direct at the same time. The man pretended not to hear. Cora wouldn’t be dissuaded. Louder this time, “Excuse me! Do you need a bag?!” The man could no longer pretend not to hear. He turned, looked up from his phone a little sheepishly, pretended (?) to be taking in the situation for the first time, then responded, “Oh—did my dog? No…I got it.” And he went back and cleaned up after his dog.
It’s a relatively small thing, but there’s not much I consider more rude than not cleaning up after your dog. Of course, I tell myself not to judge too quickly—that perhaps there were extenuating circumstances. Perhaps the owner had a perfectly good explanation for leaving that pile of poop in my yard. But usually I can’t think of what that might possibly have been.
So imagine my chagrin a few weeks back (before we had all this snow) when I was walking our dog Luna to church just to grab a few things, and she stopped almost exactly halfway between our house and church to do her business, and I went to our treat bag I was carrying that has a compartment just for poop bags, only to discover the compartment was empty. That’s okay—I thought—don’t panic. This treat bag has a secret pocket where I stash a back-up bag for just such an occasion as this… And I opened the secret pocket, only to discover that someone had pilfered the extra bag long ago and never bothered to replace it..
Suddenly I found myself far from home with a dog that had just left an unwanted gift on some stranger’s front yard and I had no bag with which to pick it up. I looked around. There was no one to be seen. But then I remembered the recent heated exchange on nextdoor.com where, in an attempt at public shaming, one neighbor posted a video of another letting their dog poop and not picking it up. Apparently this person’s Ring doorbell camera had captured the whole thing. I looked at the door—I couldn’t tell if it had a camera doorbell or not. But just in case I made apologetic motions with my hands, tried to point out I was out of poop bags, and made my best attempt to explain through charades that I was going to go get a bag and come right back.
I made a mental note of which house it was, hung my head down low, and left the scene of the crime as quickly as possible. I hurried the rest of the way to church, and even though I wasn’t going to be there long, I didn’t wait at all, grabbed a bag from the kitchen, and went straight back to the house in question. I remedied the situation, felt relieved that it didn’t look like anyone even knew anything was amiss, and again began considering myself to be a good neighbor.
The obvious take-away here is a lesson in humility. The words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount were quick to pop into my head: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. ‘Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.’” (Matthew 7:1-5, NIV) And I realized that perhaps I needed to be more gracious toward others, even (yes, even!) when they let their dog poop on my front yard.
But as we enter into the season of Lent, there’s another
take-away here as well. Ash Wednesday is a time to remember in particular our
own sinfulness, our own mortality, our own need for a savior. And this story of
Luna and the empty poop bag container reminds me that it’s not always other
people that mess up. It helped me realize that I tend to think of other
people as the sinners and tend to think of myself as a pretty good guy. But one
of the reminders of Ash Wednesday is that we “all have sinned and fall short of
the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)
No comments:
Post a Comment