SUNDAY: Bible Study - 9:00 AM | Worship - 10:00 AM | PM Worship - 6:00 PM WEDNESDAY: Bible Class - 7:00 PM ~ 8110 Signal Hill Road Manassas, Virginia | Office Phone: 703.368.2622

Sergeant Stubby            In 1917, while the 102nd Infantry’s 26th Yankee Division was training at Yale University, they adopted a mutt they named Stubby, and whom they trained to salute by lifting his right front paw to his brow.  When they shipped out for France they smuggled him along.  Stubby was discovered by their commanding officer on the boat over, but before he could be disposed of he saluted.  Impressed, their CO named Stubby the unit’s official mascot, and made him a private.*

            Stubby was a great asset to the unit.  He became sensitive to chemical agents, and would run through the trenches barking his warning, giving his comrades ample time to don their gas masks.  He regularly crawled with medics into no-man’s land to help pull wounded soldiers off the field.  Once a German spy infiltrated the Allied trenches, but Stubby identified him immediately and kept him pinned until he could be apprehended.  By War’s end Stubby had served in 17 battles in 18 months, was promoted to Sergeant, and received two purple hearts.  After the War he met President Wilson, and became the official mascot of Georgetown University.

            We humans love these kinds of stories about our best friends.  And there seems to be an endless supply.  Dogs seem to be uniquely engineered to help humans.  We may not need them to hunt and herd much anymore but where would we be without rescue dogs, seizure dogs, drug dogs, therapy dogs, etc, etc….?  A recent episode of the PBS series NOVA, titled “Dogs Decoded” demonstrated that dogs have a unique ability to understand human communication.  Young puppies will follow your finger as you point at something, or even the direction of your eyes.  They do this naturally, and other animals can’t even be trained to do it.  A dog is never happier than when working with its master at something.  This is how God made them – to serve us in ways we are only beginning to imagine.

            God made us to serve each other (see Ephesians 4.7-16; Romans 12.3-8, I Peter 4.10).  True happiness is found in serving our Master by serving each other.  When we keep the resources with which God has so richly blessed us we cheat each other, we cheat God, and we will be judged.  This is clearly the theme of the Parable of the Rich Farmer, whose only idea about what to do with his windfall harvest is to hoard and enjoy (Luke 12.16-21).  It is also the theme of the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25.14-30). 

            That second parable makes a further point. When we use the blessings of God, as He intends, we don’t lose anything - we gain. “For to everyone who has more will be given, and he shall have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25.29).

            This verse, in which the 5 talent man gets a sixth, is easily misunderstood out of context.  Billie Holliday wrote a haunting, poignant song, “God Bless the Child,” based upon it – and she got the meaning all wrong.  She understood it to mean “If you got money you got lots of friends…”  The moral to the parable really means something akin to the motto of the Stepping Stones: “All I have is what I give away; what I keep I lose forever.”  The writer of Ecclesiastes puts it this way: Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days (Ecclesiastes 11.1) .Jesus says: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but who loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it.”

            We only experience true abundance when we cooperate with God’s design of things and share the blessings He abundantly provides.  To refuse to share is to cut ourselves off from who we really are – it is to lose our identity and our resources.

            Just as dogs were designed to serve us, we are designed to serve each other.  Selfishness in a human is as unbecoming as a dog that meows.

* “Mental Floss,” July/August 2013, p.14

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