One of my favorite new pastimes is walking our dog, Maggie. I get my exercise, she gets her exercise and we are both so much better for it. But we don’t just hook up the leash and go for it…as we have both learned from our obedience school lessons…there is a correct way to walk… and an incorrect way to walk.
The correct way to walk (to heel) keeps Maggie on a loose leash on my left side. She walks even with me and sometimes slightly behind. In this position, I am the leader and I can turn left or right or take an abrupt about-face and she can move with me with ease because she is close to me and can easily see me. Her being in this position is not restrictive to her either because I can also easily keep an eye on her and when she needs to sniff or “take a break” I can simply slow down or stop. I lead, she follows and we both enjoy our walk.
Conversely, the incorrect way for her to walk is ahead of me. As she moves ahead of me, she loses sight of me. Losing sight of me means that she becomes the leader and the decision maker and as I have learned about dogs…they don’t like to make decisions, they need a leader…it stresses them out if they feel they have to lead. So now we have a stressed-out Maggie out in front of me and “pulling” on the leash. (If dogs feel tension on the leash, they naturally feel the need to pull against it…I learned that in “doggie school” too.) So she’s stressed out and pulling against me and now when I want to turn left or right or around, the only way to do so makes me pull on her leash…which creates more stress…in her and in me. The walk becomes a struggle. The enjoyment is gone.
Despite the pulling, the stress, and the anxiety…she always feels the need to initially take the lead and to get out in front of me on our walks. So each time, I have to spend the first few minutes of our walk (and sometimes more…) “reminding her” to heel…and here’s how I do it…
When she takes off and begins to walk ahead, I can tell that she is no longer keeping tabs on me. She is lost in the new smells, the sights, and the countless other things competing for her attention. Once I see that she is no longer aware of my presence…I’ll simply stop walking abruptly and hold tight to the leash. The result is she quickly gets to the end of the leash and she suffers the shock of an immediate “correction”. Meaning…she gets the heck jerked out of herself.
The extent of the jerk is never my doing…it’s always based on the speed and momentum of her moving away from me. The quicker she leaves me…the stronger the impact of the jerk will be when she reaches the end of the leash.
Sometimes I’ll have to start and stop walking several times in a row and each time she’ll jerk, stop and look at me and then when we start walking again…she’ll take off and I’ll stop and she’ll jerk and we do it several times and then she finally catches on. She’ll take off and I’ll stop and she’ll take another step and realize I’ve stopped and then she’ll stop and look back at me until I start walking again. This is our “dance” over who will be the leader of the walk. We do it every night.
The best nights are when we both slowly walk out the front door and slowly turn down onto the sidewalk. One stop and she’s reminded and then she returns to my side (or slightly behind) and off we go. Loose leash, no anxiety, both of us enjoying the walk and each other’s company…
So why go into so much detail about walking a dog…?
Well, I think sometimes God must feel the same way about us. He knows where we should be in relation to Him. He knows that when we keep Him in our sights, our lives are better and we are happier and safer. In essence, he wants us to “heel”.
Yet, we don’t. Like Maggie, each day we take off with our own ideas, agendas, thoughts, beliefs, and needs and it’s not too long before we suffer for it. God simply stops walking and we get jerked by our own doings.
I’ve learned a lot about myself from Maggie. We are more alike than I care to admit. I love that dog with all of my heart and it breaks my heart to see her “corrected” each time we walk. But I just have to love her enough to let her experience the “correction” that she has created by leaving me.
So when I’m feeling stressed, anxious, or frustrated about something, I now think about Maggie and our walks and I ask myself…
“Am I heeling?”
Well, we both know the answer to that…