Monday, January 15, 2018
Martin Luther King Day
My Christmas present to Barb this year was a DNA kit to help us figure out what kind of dog her little rescue dog is. You have to swab the dog’s cheek two different times, for fifteen seconds, and I can tell you, Shy didn’t like that at all. Then you send the swabs into a lab, in this special container, and wait a few weeks for the results.
And we were shocked.
Shy is a little dog, 9 pounds, 6 ounces, and we thought he was mostly Yorkshire Terrier. He looks like a terrier, with terrier ears and scruffy terrier fur.
But he turns out to be Chihuahua—62.5% Chihuahua! He’s 25% mixed breeds, too, including terriers, and 12.5% miniature poodle. But Chihuahua? 62.5%? We don’t like Chihuahuas! We make fun of Chihuahuas! If Shy had been called a Chihuahua on the website where we found him, we never would have clicked!
But now we’ve had him a year, and Barb has trained him to be a therapy dog and a Read Dog, and she’s nuts about him, she’s just nuts about him, and I am, too. He’s the sweetest, quirkiest little dog you can imagine.
We have so many assumptions, don’t we—about color, about appearance, about breed—we put things in so many categories, give them so many labels. But the facts almost always prove us wrong—the facts, the facts, the lovely facts–Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior shining in his love and good humor through everything in the universe, through all shapes and colors and kinds of people, through everything that lives and moves and has its being.
Even little dogs. Even Chihuahuas!
Even you. Even me.