The Leash

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – Psalm 25:1-10

Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation [Psalm 25:4-5].

Abby was a chocolate brown toy poodle, and for more than seventeen years, she was Jane’s and mine. Abby walked the way most dogs walk — sometimes out ahead of me, at other times beside me, nose down, working out whatever a poodle’s nose works out.

Yet every so often, without a specific sign or warning, she would stop, turn, and take the leash itself into her mouth. She did so not to chew it nor to fight it. Instead, she’d gently close her teeth around it, where there was some slack, and she’d give one small, but deliberate pull. The pull could be toward a butterfly. It might be away from the yard with the barking dog. Sometimes, she’d gently tug back toward our house, as if she’d decided we’d gone far enough.

She wasn’t straining to get free of the leash. I think that she sometimes just wanted some part in deciding where the walk was going.

As I read the Twenty-Fifth Psalm, I think the psalmist wants exactly that from God. “Make me to know your ways, O LORD; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth, and teach me” [Psalm 25:4-5]. Read on their own, those words might point toward pure surrender.

But just a few verses later, the psalmist asks for something quite particular:

Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD, and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old. Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness' sake, O LORD [25:6-7].

A footnote in one of my commentaries offers that within verses 6 and 7, the psalmist makes his boldest move: the same psalmist who asks to be taught also dares to instruct God. The psalmist tells God what to remember, and what to forget.

In doing so, the “prayer” has a hand on the leash. In English, prayer, rhyming with player, originally meant simply the one who prays, not the words themselves. Now, however, “prayer” almost always describes the words, and not the person. Here in the psalm, is it the words that dare to instruct God? Or does the instruction come instead from the one who says or writes them? The answer, of course, is “Yes.”

Which brings us back to the leash.

I never once yielded to Abby’s tugs. We didn’t wander off after butterflies. We didn’t head home before I was ready. I was always the one who watched for traffic.

And yet, in those 17 years or so, I didn’t discourage her tugs. When she took the leash in her mouth, I’d slow down. I’d let her have her moment of steering. I’d feel the small tension of her preference against mine, but we’d go on the way that I had intended.

I could do that since her tugs cost me nothing. They never once put her in the path of a car I hadn’t already seen.

I think that in a somewhat similar fashion, God’s steadfast love can afford to hear from us, too. God doesn’t need our prayers to run the world correctly. God can receive them anyway. God can slow down for them, even delight in them. Nothing in them is ever going to send the walk somewhere God hasn’t already seen is safe.

Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way. All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees [Psalm 25:8-10].

Like the psalmist in Psalm 25, God teaches us that humility isn’t necessarily silent. It comes with a voice. In this psalm, we learn that the humble are the ones who keep asking. We’re asking to be taught. Just as plainly, we’re asking for mercy instead of justice.

We enjoyed Abby seventeen years before she died. What I remember now isn’t so much the walking as the tugs. They were small and insistent. Her tugs were never in charge of where we were going. But her tugs were never refused.

I don’t know what God remembers about me. I know what I keep asking Him to.