I awoke in the middle of the night or so it seemed for it was still dark outside my window. I was groggy, but I knew I'd heard something. What was it? The puppies! I was awake in an instant. Glady was having her puppies! I scrambled out of bed as fast as I could and ran down the two flights of stairs that took me to where my mom and one of my three sisters sat and watched Glady, lying in an open box filled with old blankets. She was licking one of three tiny black puppies. I'd never seen anything so small that was actually a real live puppy! They were so small even I could have fit one in the palm of my hand - and I was only 7 years old. They were cuter than any stuffed animal I'd ever seen. I wanted so much to hold one, but my mom said that Glady wouldn't like that very much, so I just watched as she licked them (Mom said that was her way of giving them a bath) and as they snuggled with her. They couldn't even open their eyes yet. It wasn't too long before the sun was up and I had to get ready for school. It was hard to make it through that day. It seemed to last for a week, but the 3:30 bell finally rang. I ran home as fast as I could. The puppies looked so different! Before, they looked like itty-bitty seals with feet instant of flippers. Now they looked like puppies - tiny puppies. Since we were going to sell two of them, we couldn't give them real names. The people who would buy them would do that. So we gave them fun names just for us to call them: Inky, Dinky, and Parlevous. Inky and Dinky were boys. Parlevous was a girl - the one we were going to keep. As the puppies grew, Glady became less protective of them. Some times it almost seemed like she was glad for us to take them away from her for a while! It was fun to play with them and watch them learn how to walk. They made us laugh a lot. Six weeks went by quickly; and soon it was time for Inky and Dinky to go to their new homes. It was a sad goodbye but knowing that Parlevous was going to stay made it a little easier. We decided to give her a real name now that her brothers were going to get real names too. So we named her Kippy. She never got very big because she was a toy poodle unlike her mom who was a miniature. Kippy loved to romp and play. We all loved her so much that when she had to leave us many years later, I knew that I'd always have a dog and I hoped they would all be just like her.
“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3 Become like little children? Really? Children are definitely cute and innocent, but that pretty much covers the positive qualities. On the negative side, however, the list is quite a bit lengthier: demanding, dependent, self-centered, messy, often smelly, expensive, and embarrassingly honest. So why? WHY in the world would Jesus tell us to become like little children? WHY in the world would He want that? What was He thinking?! Well, He was a thirty-something year-old bachelor. Maybe He didn't really know what He was talking about when He said that. I mean, if we come to Him like little children, it's pretty much guaranteed to be messy. We're likely to be crabby, cranky. We might be downright angry. Prayer-ADD is hard to control on a good day. If we're not on top of it, if we don't have our list in front of us to focus our thoughts, we...
Took me back to my dog Libby having puppies! what endearing memories! Sisto Angie
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