Pet learnings

We have four pets, and each one has some form of ailment and/or disability.

Our dog, our longest-tenured animal, no longer can hear and has what the veterinarian calls doggy dementia. (That's not the term he used, but it's the essential translation.) She walks in circles, gets stuck behind furniture and can't figure out how to extricate herself.

Our oldest cat can hear a little bit but is blind. He walks into things and cries when lost. This tom spends a great deal of time on the couch and is very affectionate.

We have a morbidly obese tabby whose sole reason for existing -- beyond sleeping -- appears to be checking and rechecking his food bowl.

We also have a cute younger feline rescued from a nearby park. This final cat has the wobbles, a condition for which the vet says there is no effective treatment. Sometimes he just falls over.

And then there's my wife and me -- and we won't get into our medical issues. We're a family, all of us, human, feline, canine, and none of us is operating at peak capacity.

When I peruse the Bible, I like to read of characters who are having personal problems.

Such detail makes these biblical figures authentic because life teaches that all of us struggle with something difficult -- whether it be physical, emotional, behavioral or mental.

King Saul was paranoid and insecure. King David had a wandering eye (e.g., Bathsheba) and was a lax parent.

King Solomon started out well, endowed with wisdom, but couldn't say no to his wives and turned some of his own people into slaves -- forcing them to construct massive building projects in Jerusalem.

The fact archaeologists can find no evidence of these Solomonic palaces doesn't diminish the story for me.

St. Paul was said to have had a "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7-9), about which he does not elaborate, but it has not stopped speculation. Perhaps Paul was an epileptic.

We have no idea what it was, and guesses aren't useful. Suffice it to say, the first century's greatest evangelist had a problem, and he knew it.

Although it is fruitless for us to try to figure out Paul's problem, we can learn something from him. We can pay attention to how the apostle chose to understand a reason for his ailment.

In the opening verses of 2 Corinthians chapter 12, Paul explains the visions and revelations he has received from God, epiphanies that may cause a man to brag.

In fact, Paul uses variations of the word "boast" three times in the first six verses of the chapter.

The man who received his commission along the Damascus Road seems to understand he may be in real danger of getting a big head.

Not to worry. This unexplained thorn in the flesh keeps Paul from what he calls "becoming conceited."

Maybe it would help us to see personal problems the way Paul saw his -- not as some sort of cosmic accident, but rather some mysterious method of keeping us grounded, humble and reliant on others.

This may seem a bit of a leap in logic, but remember I'm using St. Paul's experience as a template.

The other day, I sat at a banquet with two other people, and we realized that in recent months all three of our families had been touched with cancer.

Cancer is a terrifying word when it touches someone close to you. You fear the worst ... immediately.

We shared stories of diagnosis and treatment; we mentioned the names of specialists and hospitals used.

What dawned on us after talking a while is we had formed, without being aware of it, a community within a community.

We were all Realtors, but now also Realtors living with cancer in our lives.

Trouble, difficulty, illness and disease all push us into the world of other people.

C.S. Lewis, the great academic dean and writer, who died the same day as John F. Kennedy, opined that without pain all of us would be content to do what little kids do -- that is, parallel play in our own private sandboxes.

Small children are content to play entirely by themselves even with somebody right beside them. That's parallel play.

Pain, Lewis wrote, pushes us into the sandbox of the other -- into the world of other people.

Pain, the author of "The Chronicles of Narnia" wrote, is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Pain, as odd as it sounds, may have benefits.

It's amazing what our pets can teach us, huh?