Walking gingerly up our front porch steps, she stopped and waited until she heard the door swing until she continued into the house. Without hesitation, she strolls into the kitchen, turns around and sits down - preparing to mooch. Eclipse! Her head cocks, ears perk and she looks straight at me. Or rather, tries to look straight at me. As her tail begins to wag, my eyes begin to fill with tears. I look straight into her once-brown eyes, now filled with smokey blue-grey cataracts. You see, my girl is almost completely blind. I didn't realize until this weekend how bad her condition had gotten. Less than 3 months ago my folks took Eclipse, my 9-year old black lab, to the vet to adjust her diet because she was starting to chug water. What they found out instead was that she wasn't hungry - she was diabetic. It didn't take long for the cataracts to set in, even as my parents went about learning how to give her insulin and test her blood-glucose levels. Even now, she still isn't fully back to her old self - and reality is, maybe never will be. As I sat up with her the other night - her head propped over my leg and her body tucked against it - I thought about how much faith she had. She still walked places, only now, she walked closer to us instead of up ahead. She still went for car rides, even though she had to sit still because she couldn't see the edge of the seat. And she still shook hands for a treat, even though she had to use her nose to find you first before she stuck her paw out. Watching her, I thought about how depressed I'd be about missing out on life. But instead, she trusted us even more than before. It was as if she was experiencing life in a completely new and different way. Sick as she was, she sat patiently for her shots, walked when we called her and even allowed us to carry her up and down stairs (without fidgeting) when she got nervous. I wonder, if God put cataracts on my spiritual eyes, how much more willing I would be to walk close to Him? Would I cling to Him tighter when I wasn't sure what my next step looked like, trusting that when He picked me up, the place He put me down would be safe? Could I curl up in His lap and believe that, regardless of the pain I felt, that His intentions were for my best interest? Would I be able to delight in the new way I was experiencing the world, in having to rely on His voice and His presence instead of the visible ways He tries to get my attention? I want to trust like my Eclipse. To be perfectly content in who I am, faithfully continuing to live despite all the changes that might be physically affecting me. Even without knowing what tomorrow will hold or whether she will live to see another day, she still smiles, wags her tail and follows me out the door to go for a walk... As the songwriter Michael Card put it - "To hear with my heart, to see with my soul, to be guided by a hand I cannot hold, to trust in a way that I cannot see, that's what faith must be."
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