Sam the World’s Ugliest Dog
Sometimes my daughter makes comments like “Mommy, I don’t like brown people.” Or, “Mommy, why is that man so fat?” In a best case scenario, we are at home or at least out of hearing of people who are brown, fat, or otherwise different from her. She also points out my own size and shape at least once a week, and finds it howlingly funny that I am comfortably round in shape. Instead of telling her not to say “fat”, I embrace it. “Yup. Mommy is fat, and you are skinny, and some people are really tall or really short or black or white or brown – but it’s the inside part that matters. That’s what God looks at and that’s what I look at.”
Recently we had this discussion at the park, and I took a moment to pull up a picture of Sam on my phone, a now deceased Chinese Crested dog who won the title of World’s Ugliest Dog several years in a row. Just look at him – you can see why he won by a landslide, right? I showed Paisley this picture and she just about leapt off the bench in horror at the sight of Sam. “Mommy – nobody could love this dog, not even God, right?”
I have known about Sam for awhile, and was kind of excited to have a chance to share his disturbing exterior appearance with my daughter. It’s one of those weird things we could laugh about together. And, although that wasn’t necessarily the point when I showed her the picture, this was a definite teachable moment.
“Honey, believe it or not this dog has a family who loves him, and God made him and loves him, too.” She thought about that for a moment, maybe not quite believing me. “Yeah, but he’s probably really mean, so people still don’t like him.”
I thought about that for a moment. About appearances, and loving people for the inside part, and Jesus’ call to love others as ourselves. And I realized that I fall short in that category. I have people in my own life who rub me the wrong way or strike me as less than in some way who I don’t treat with the love and care Jesus has called me to do. In my own grown up way, I hold people like that at a distance the way my daughter does with an ugly dog or a kid at school who is a little too different to be automatically accepted. The difference is, she is in kindergarten.
This exchange – which happened a couple of months ago now – served up a slice of humble pie that I’ve been chewing on ever since. The people in my life who yank my chain and drive me up a wall and just don’t play by the rules are showing an ugly dog side to the world, but there is more to these people than meets the eye. God made them and loves them and he is calling me to look deeper.
I’ve always thought of “loving the inside part” as setting aside the physical facade. It was a racial issue, or a pretty enough issue, or a size/weight issue. But now I think the Sams of the world aren’t just the non-beauty contest winners, but the ones who put up an “ugly wall” in action. That kind of ugly is harder to deal with. But God is asking me to love the inside part and look beyond the ugly behavior. And I’ve got a lot of work to do.
Alice Goes to Motherland 