Steal My Heart then Take My House

We were both anxious and excited when the day came to collect our puppy. Bred somewhere in the north of Ontario, and found by my daughter on the internet, the month-long wait had come for her delivery. The pickup point was at a gas station at the intersection of two major junctions in the city. We waited, with a picture of her printed from the website, hoping that we would recognize her from a litter of four identical siblings. Then the owner arrived and by that time four other couples and their excited kids had convened at the gas station. We wondered who was getting whom and if we should make their acquaintance so as to keep the puppies in touch.  

The owner opened the trunk of her blue hatchback and one by one she picked up a puppy and called the name of its buyer. Every one of them looked like our puppy but ours came out last. She was truly the runt of the litter. Clearly anxious that she was in a new environment, she whimpered when the owner handed her to my daughter. We paid and with our puppy nicely tucked in a crate on the back seat we could not wait to get home.

We named her Ivy. Life in the next few weeks was tough and tiring to the point that my clean-freak wife threatened on a number of occasions to give her away. But training pads saved the day. At first we placed limits on her roaming. Gates were here, there, and everywhere. But in time those barriers fell, slowly and imperceptibly, until she took over the couch, then the house, and finally our bed. We realized the exchange was complete when she took control of our schedules and put curfews on our nights out. We had become the pets. By the time she died close to eleven years later she had so completely stolen our hearts and made such an impact on our lives that she had inspired a biography: Life According to Ivy: Lessons from a Dog (Amazon Kindle). 

I believe Ivy’s gradual takeover of our lives relays a simple but powerful truth God wants us to learn and it is this: if we can steal his heart we can have the expansion we need in life. This is the essence of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Mt.6:3). Much of the frustration we experience is due to an outside-in approach to life. We look for things instead of seeking to win the heart of the Giver. Jesus wants us to know that the things we need in life are natural byproducts of a life that is harmony with the will and purposes of God and as such ought not to be the objects of pursuit. These things are automatically “added” when our hearts and wills merge with that of our Father, when we share his values, and seek conformity to his nature.

David caught on to this formula for an abundant life. He stole the heart of God. “I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after my own heart, who will do all my will” (Acts 13:22). And in return God made him Israel’s greatest king. Both Ivy and David learnt that the secret to expansion is to steal the heart of your Owner.