Monday, September 8, 2008

A New Lesson In Life From My Puppy

I was blessed at the same time challenged to have a new puppy, whose name is Princess. She is a three month old Shih Tzu, tri-colored and extremely adorable,cute, and playful. Having a puppy has its ups and downs. Most of the downs include the expenses that are incurred, and cleaning up after it messes up.

You might be asking why I had to clean up when I could train her to pee and poo outside. Well, she poos outside now, very seldom does she poo inside, but I don't know why she loves to pee everywhere! Outside, inside, EXCEPT my room, where she sleeps. Its amazing that she never had a record of doing her stuff in there.

But, one day as I was cleaning up one of her pee escapades indoors, I noticed a life lesson. Her pee would be considered maybe a hand scoop full, not too much. And it didn't spread. However, the amount of clean water you need to clean a small amount of pee, is almost a small bucket of clean water! And the effort also is double since you need to re-wipe the area, and put some lysol so the scent would be covered.

This is where the lesson in life enters. It popped up into my head the moment I saw the water running from the faucet as I cleaned the mop. It is simple. The mess represents the mistakes we make in life. The mop and the water represents the amount of "repair" we need to do. Naturally, we need to clean up the mess the puppy made ourselves (if you want it done right), and ASAP, to avoid it being spread all over and messing other stuff up. In parallel, when we do make mistakes, we need to learn from them ASAP, or try to mend what is broken before it messes up other people's lives and gets to unknown proportions. The mess also needs to be cleaned the right way, and it usually means a lot more effort than making the mistake itself. Usually it is 10 times more, if not a lot more. If we do it the short cut way, like sweeping it under the rug (yuck), or just covering it up with dust, we will definitely end up messing up other stuff as well! So, in life, we need to deal with issues the right way and in the proper attitude so we can fix the problem we caused.

Now if you notice, people who know that your pooch messed up in that particular spot will not step over it even after it is thoroughly cleaned. Yup they wont. Much more if it is not! The lesson is this, even after you've dealt with your mistake, repaired all the damage, said sorry and all, it will take time for people to forget what happened. We cannot change that, however we can change ourselves by not passing judgement on people who made mistakes in their lives. Since we now know better, we are to understand more, and instead of putting people down, we need to help them up and be an encouragement and a support.

Another reason we need to deal with our mess asap is because the longer it is left uncleaned, the scent will spread, the risk of the poop getting stepped upon, and the trouble it causes other people (and yourself) piles up exponentially. So we need to clean up asap, the right way (it takes a proper process), and with the right attitude.

It is amazing to learn life lessons from a poop of my dog. I choose to look at it in the positive way, whenever she does that. But the last lesson I learned is to teach her to do her stuff properly, and it only means that we should train ourselves and others in the ways of righteousness and truth (found in the Bible), so that we can all avoid the mistakes and the complications that arise from it.

Thank you Princess(my dog) for that wonderful lesson!

No comments:

tamperproof worshipper

tamperproof worshipper
rock it for Jesus