Many trips around the sun by the giant blue rock we call, “Earth”, ago, I was a teenage missionary. For four summers, I would travel to various places around Ontario. There’s a ton of weird stories that I can share. Look! Here's one now...My final summer was spent in and around Toronto. Every week, another missionary and I would stay at a gracious person’s house for the week. It was a bit of a crap shoot. Some weeks, the places we stayed at rocked and other places socked, I mean, sucked.
One great week started off rough. We arrived at a lovely woman’s home who was very gracious but also very old (nothing wrong with that). She had, unfortunately, lost her husband in the spring or late winter and the house was still set up to reflect that. Towels were lined across the floor for where she would walk or assist her husband to the bathroom. This woman was very sweet but perhaps, a little overwhelmed with life as it had been a rough few months.
We arrived and before we even had a chance to unpack, she had us sit down for lunch. She had a small dog that didn’t move a whole lot but, from what I could tell, it was still breathing. Waiting at the table, I noticed that the woman had a tray with pieces of lettuce circling it. It looked pretty fancy.
For this tray, she looked to prepare some lunch meat for us. Glancing into the kitchen again, I saw a can of dog food (it could have been Dr. Ballard’s ‘cause it had a German Shepherd on it, I think). Using the can opener, she opened the can and then let the meat slide out of the can onto the tray.
‘That’s a pretty fancy way to serve the dog, it's food.’ I thought. Hold the phone. She started to slice the meat into one inch wide pieces and splayed it out like a dealer in a casino would at the blackjack table. Placing the condiments on the table, she went back into the kitchen and picked up the tray and walked past the dog and into the dining room.
Uh, oh.
She placed the tray with other actual people food on the table and I thought this was perhaps a joke. I glanced over at the other missionary because, maybe I just imagined it or was confused.
The other missionary’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. He too realized what I had now realized. The cold, hard truth.
We were being served dog food. Arf! Arf!
Being the good missionaries that we were, we prayed and then began to survey what to eat. The organization we worked for had trained us to be courteous, kind and polite. What could we do but be courteous, kind and polite?
Immediately, I grabbed the mustard and a piece of the dog meat and I sprayed that mustard all over that meat. My fellow missionary tried a different tactic and he put the meat in between two slices of bread and put some lettuce, mustard and perhaps other stuff to disguise the doggy truth. I’ll be honest, it tasted like bad spam (is there actually any good spam?).
We did it and survived. The next day, our stomachs revolted a little bit but all in all, it was survivable. Plus I received all the proper nutrients a good dog needs!
The week went well after that as there were no canine foods prepared for us. The only other thing that was a little scary was her driving us where a prerequisite was to cross yourself and say a prayer. She was a really nice woman though who had seen some really tough times and she gave us someplace to stay.
I don’t know if there’s a moral to this tale but I can say that I respected that woman for sharing her home with us for a week. She didn’t have to but she most certainly did.
I guess life is like that right? All in all, we may have our good days and bad days but through it all, when we look back at those moments in time, we can look back in gratitude. We can be thankful for what we were given or be thankful that a major crapfest was over with and we've turned a corner.
Perspective takes us to a whole other world where the mundane is a little more magical and the terrible proved that we are warriors that overcame something once thought insurmountable.
My hope for you, regardless of the season you are in in your life that even if life gives you lemons (or dog food), it will pass. When it passes, we reflect, contemplate and strive to do better.
May you and I do better in every bowl of doggie chow we encounter in life.
It will make for a cleaner fur coat and a better experience to live an authentic life.
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